All well and good and worthy of discussion. But here are the real questions coming out of the show.

1: Can the appeal of Oracle’s technology overcome customer FUD?

The issue of technology audits was an undercurrent throughout the show. Oracle, like any software company, audits customers. But it gets negative style points in how it does so.

In a quick meeting in front of the Iron Men at Oracle Openworld, a systems integrator and an IT pro with long experience in Sun shops, said they’re seeing more and more audits in Sun hardware accounts, and much heavier-handed ones than in the past.

Audits have ramped up since Oracle completed its acquisition of Sun and the new wrinkle is that customers updating Sun machines running Oracle apps are now, within days of dealing with the hardware sales force, being hit up by Oracle software sales. The message tends to be: You have to buy more software licenses for your new hardware. One customer was told he needed to buy more Oracle database licenses for the apps he already had as he moved them to new hardware. That was not true. His apps had the requisite database power to stay legal. Hey, guess it doesnt hurt to ask.

2: How long will the Hurd-Catz duality last?

Ellison is famous for burning through number two execs. Charles Phillips (or “the fallen”  as Marc Benioff referred to him)   lasted a very impressive  seven years. Safra Catz has been there longer.

On paper, Mark Hurd compliments Ellison well: He’s an operations-and-logistics guy. Ellison is a strategy guy who parachutes in for the odd (and long) keynote or the multi-billion-dollar acquisition. Only thing is that Catz, like Hurd,  is also a logician who makes the trains run on time. Oracle is a big company but is it big enough for both these powerhouses? This could get interesting.

3:Will Oracle Exadata/Exalogic signal a return to the mainframe mentality?

Whatever Larry Ellison says, this whole notion of software-and-hardware-designed to work together is a very old notion. Sometimes he even acknowledges the debt Oracle owes the old IBM.  To some extent the whole argument of whether Exalogic represents a cloud in a box is beside the point. Sure Exalogic can power a cloud. How much would Ellison love it if AWS powered its cloud on Exalogic instead of zillions of Intel servers?

This is just a return to the age-old big iron vs. distributed computing battle and it’s unclear that folks are really hankering for a return to that big and very expensive iron. Especially when they see the maintenance-and-support costs involved.

Ellison also ripped multi-tenancy as an “old” technology and touted virtualization as the key to true cloudiness. Um, as one colleague noted: “Multitenancy may be 15 years old, but virtualization is FIFTY years old!”

4: Can Oracle curb its impulse to monetize at all costs?

When Oracle raised support prices on Sun hardware, Sun customers were outraged. They’d gotten used to a pretty good thing. The independent Sun Microsystems, as it struggled, was easy peasy when it came to enforcing support policies. Flexibility was the word of the day. Customers and Sun VARs decried Oracle as greedy. But, one naysayer countered: “Is it greed or is it just fair?”

Given that the support clock starts ticking as the Sun-Oracle hardware leaves the loading dock — so customers pay for hardware they don’t even have in house – it’s easy to call it greed.

The costs don’t end with delivery and installation however. Simply moving existing Sun hardware to another data center turns out to be very pricey as well. One company that specializes in data center moves said Oracle quoted a price to unplug and re-certify Sun servers at what amounted to be $6,000 to $8,000 per hour.

5: Can Oracle salve hurt feelings over Java?

Folks in the Java One fold were none too happy to be jettisoned from their usual Moscone haunts to the hotel hinterland this week.  And, they wanted to know what happened to the Ellison-and-Thomas Kurian session they’d been promised. They’re already irked that Oracle let James Gosling take his ball and go home. And some (though not all) are miffed about the lawsuit Oracle filed vs. Google.

6: What happened to Ellison un-plugged?

In past OpenWorlds, the best part was the audience Q&A with Ellison. It’s been gone for a few years now and the show is diminished as a result. Sure, corporate message mongers like it that Ellison is more scripted now–one year he “announced” a price change that, apparently, no one else knew about.  Truthfully, I can’t even remember if the price change ever happened but things like that differentiated the show and is why it’s time to bring Ellison unplugged back.

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In case anyone forgot, Oracle got the Java franchise via its $7.5 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems. And there has been worry about its stewardship over the popular development language ever since.  Ironically, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was a Sun exec who helped shape that company’s strategy of releasing versions of the language under open source licenses to entrench it in many markets. According to Oracle, Java for Developers, Java for Your Computer, and JavaFX are the three most downloaded items from Oracle’s web site

The suit, filed in the U.S. district court in northern California,  alleges that Google Android infringes upon Java’s patents and copyrights. Kim Polese, a former Sun exec who has since worked long in the open-source trenches, told the Wall Street Journal that the suit is “very perplexing.”

Oracle’s legal team includes superstar David Boies of Boies, Schiller & Flexner, LLP, fresh off his victory in the California Prop 8 case.

This lawsuit sets up a potentially huge battle between the largest enterprise software company  (Oracle) and the largest consumer software company (Google.)

This is the second time in a week that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison appears to be fighting battles for non-Oracle buddies. Earlier he sent an unsolicited letter to The New York Times blasting Hewlett-Packard’s board for forcing out HP CEO Mark Hurd. Observers point out that Ellison is also tight with Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Google’s Android is fast on a pace to pass Apple iPhone sales.

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Oracle execs said JavaOne will be “co-located” with the huge Oracle OpenWorld show in San Francisco next September.

The next question is: How and where?

OOW already takes up every square inch of the various Moscone Center complex. The conference already closes off Howard Street to add additional real estate and spills over into local hotels.. Channel meetings for example, happen offsite at the Hilton (or was it the Hyatt?) Given Oracle’ s news that it’s taking the biggest and best Sun customers direct, perhaps the channel players who survive that putsch will meet on Alcatraz?

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Check out the updated FAQ on Oracle.com, which says that Glassfish will also be safe and sound.

“Oracle plans to continue evolving GlassFish Enterprise Server, delivering it as the open source reference implementation (RI) of the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) specifications, and actively supporting the large GlassFish community. Additionally, Oracle plans to invest in aligning common infrastructure components and innovations from Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server to benefit both Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server customers.”

Of course, given the hesitance of the European regulators, Oracle has to make nice. To that point, the FAQ’s reiterate Ellison’s Oracle OpenWorld promise to treasure and nurture MySQL.

“Oracle plans to spend more money developing MySQL than Sun does now. Oracle expects to continue to develop and provide the open source MySQL database after the transaction closes. Oracle plans to add MySQL to Oracle’s existing suite of database products, which already includes Berkeley DB, an open source database. Oracle also currently offers InnoDB, an open source transactional storage engine and the most important and popular transaction engine under MySQL. Oracle already distributes MySQL as part of our Enterprise Linux offering.”

Netbeans? Safe.

 
“NetBeans is expected to provide an additional open source option and complement to the two free tools Oracle already offers for enterprise Java development: Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. While Oracle JDeveloper remains Oracle’s strategic development tool for the broad portfolio of Oracle Fusion Middleware products and for Oracle’s next generation of enterprise applications, developers will be able to use whichever free tool they are most comfortable with for pure Java and Java EE development: JDeveloper, Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, or NetBeans.”

 
More on this on Savio Rodrieques’ blog.

 

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