Oracle database expert, Ken Jacobs, resigned last week, apparently miffed that he did not win ownership of Oracle’s new MySQL franchise. 

 Jacobs, often known as Dr. DBA, had hoped to head up the open-sourcey MySQL effort after Oracle completed its acquisition of Sun MIcrosystems. Instead, Edward Screven, Oracle’s chief corporate architect, takes on MySQL. Screven reports directly to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and was front and center last week on Oracle’s conference call discussing the future of Sun and Oracle’s virtualization products and MySQL.  

Jacobs was vice president of product strategy for Oracle’s server products and had been with the company since 1981.

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So get ready for Oracle to go on the cloud offensive in coming weeks, with a series of “road shows” or cloud computing forums (fora?) kicking off this month.  Watch for Oracle to tout its tight relationships with Amazon and Google and other cloud pioneers.

For Ellison’s take on the cloud, flash back to last week’s marathon Web conference where Oracle execs outlined their Sun vision (and inserted hardware into Oracle’s tagline–a portentous change.)

Said Ellison: “Everything’s called cloud now. If you’re in the data center, it’s a private cloud. There’s nothing left but cloud computing. People say I’m against cloud computing–how can I be against cloud comptuing when that’s all there is?”

He also stressed what will doubtless become another key Oracle message, which is that Oracle software (and soon hardware) powers other people’s clouds.

“We already run applications for our customers. Salesforce.com, would you agree that’s cloud computing? Way to go. What do you think they use as a database? Oracle. What do you think they use for middleware?”

“Itunes? What do they use for a database? The fact that you attach your computer to the Internet does not fundamentally change the model. Hotmail’s been around for a long time. Salesforce.com has been around for more than a decade. We’ll continue to sell databases, applications and middleware, adn that’s all the cloud is.”

Still, longtime Oracle partners say Ellison squandered what could have been a golden cloud opportunity–or actually spun it off when Oracle licensed its small business suite out to NetSuite (then NetLedger) as that company’s first product.  Ellison remains a shareholder in NetSuite. He also owned a chunk of Salesforce.com back in the day. Ellison is definitely in the cloud,  but not necessarily as Oracle’s CEO.

How cloud-focused would Oracle look now if Ellison had kept all that inhouse, asked this partner. Salesforce.com continues to trounce Oracle CRM On Demand across the board, he said.

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Today, Dick Brass, a former exec who headed up Microsoft’s ill-fated tablet PC efforts, turned a spotlight on the company’s “Issues”, in a brutal New York Times Op Ed piece, decrying the silo’d thinking and fiefdoms that have prevented Microsoft from coming out with great (as in not derivative) products.  You know, products people actually want to buy, as opposed to the “we have to upgrade to stay legal” kind of products it rolls out. (To all those who would now start screaming that most of Microsoft’s innovation borrowed heavily on advances by Apple, Netscape, and Novell,  I have to quote the great  Waltmosspuppet and say: “Shut up.” ) 

Brass’s point is that Microsoft is so fractionalized by semi-automous groups, headed by executives with their own agendas, that very little that comes from outside those groups has a shot in hell.

“When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow.”

Of course, just days after Apple’s iPad announcement, Brass is trying to justify the failure of the Microsoft tablet  but his description of the Microsoft culture rings true. Insiders confirm suspicions that this particular Office head is none other than Steven “My way or the highway” Sinofsky. Sinofsky is famous for delivering key products–most notably the various Offices and then Windows 7– on time, but also for quashing any creativity that might get in the way of that delivery. BTW, Sinofksy has a new book coming out. The title? Unsurprisingly it’s One Strategy.

There are too many camps at Microsoft pulling in too many directions. The company has too many “top priorities.” Apple’s beauty and its curse is that it has a fiefdom of one. That means a big bottlenecks at Steve Job’s desk (or yoga mat, or whatever he works on.) It also means a single vision.

In other signs of the times, the company seems to be losing a lot of veteran executive talent of late.  Mike Nash, who had headed up security and other high-profile efforts during his 19 years at the borg is leaving just a month after another veteran, Bill Veghte called it quits. 

Now, Microsoft is a huge company, and it’s natural that someone might want to move on after nearly 20 years, but there just seems to be a total loss of mojo there lately, even as its next-big thing, Microsoft Azure, kicks off.

Here’s the take of one insider –but it’s not unique–you hear this over and over again in places like MiniMicrosoft: Microsoft has great talent and great technology. But it’s all silo’d and each group has too much power to naysay what someone else is doing, or won’t sign on unless the technologists report into the group.

You’ve got to wonder how Ray Ozzie, the chief strategist brought in to forge Microsoft’s cloud thinking, can prosper in this environment where a half dozen company presidents report into the CEO, Steve Ballmer, but not to him.

And you’ve got to wonder if long-simmering rumors of discord between Ozzie and Sinofsky, mean trouble for Azure ahead. After all, if a mere tablet threatened Office, think what true cloud computing means to Microsoft’s ginormous on-premises operating systems and apps business.

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Parrish’s biggest piece of advice for IT solution providers: ignoring the cloud will not stop this concept from gaining momentum but it WILL hurt their ability to play a part. That’s why her biggest topic of ongoing conversation with NetApp’s various solution provider advisory councils is deciphering how various channel models will be impacted.

NetApp’s differentiator in the transition to cloud computing will be the factor that it does not aspire to become a service provider itself. Rather, it is studying relationships with cloud service providers (think of companies like Rackspace or Terramark or Iron Mountain) that might use its technologies as the basis of their cloud infrastructure. These service providers, in turn, will rely on IT services companies and VARs to be their face to the customer AND to handle the delicate integration challenge posed by hybrid cloud/on-premise computing environments. In any case, the channel’s voice and talents will be critical to the transition and beyond.

“We will not be cutting our partners out of their ability to participate,” Parrish says. “But it is up to them to be clear on where they want to play.”

Another thing to keep in mind: there will be an extended period of transition during which business models will be imagined, defined, re-imagined and re-defined.

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Several VARs have said recently that the availability of low-interest money–when they can get it–isn’t jumpstarting IT deals. Free credit, on the other hand, could grease the skids.

“Zero percent makes the difference. There is low interest money out there for SMBs but they don’t want to pay anyinterest,” said Ryan Halper, president of Cynnex Networks, Seattle said.

That’s why he is very optimistic about Cisco’s new zero percent credit which covers deals ranging between garage shops and 1,000 seats, and from $1,000 to $250,000.  And, the deals can stretch out to three years.

Cisco affiliated VARs can use this as an excuse er–opportunity–to call back customers that have put IT buys on hold, or tabled them, and use it to nudge them in the right direction, something that Halper said is clearly on Cynnex’s agenda.

The Cisco free credit offer kicked off last week and lasts till the end of July, so we’ll have to see if zero is low enough for SMBs.

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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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Oracle’s Larry Ellison and his lieutenants will soon be ticking off their strategies for bringing Sun Microsystems into the fold and laying out Oracle’s future as a provider of integrated hardware and software. 

For a guy who once touted the beauties of dirt-cheap commodity blades–as long as they were running his $40K-per-CPU database,  this is quite an adjustment. But if you’d just forked over $7.4 billion for a server-and-chip company, you’d be talking fast too. Ellison told the Wall street Journal that, far from gutting Sun, Oracle will add 2,000 new sales and engineering hires to push his vision.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the integrated hardware-software spectrum, Larry’s pal Steve Jobs will be unveiling the Apple iTablet which that company hopes will rescue the reputation of keyboard-less-computing.  Microsoft tried dearly to breathe life into the tablet form factor–Microsoft execs like Jeff Raikes were forever toting theirs around. Too bad no one else could be bothered.

So today we’ll start seeing if Jobs can once again work his magic and if Ellison can, with Sun in house, make a real run at IBM and HP and Dell.

The CompTIA index, which measures attitudes of companies in the tech industry, looks at three different metrics: opinions about the economy, opinions about the IT industry, and opinions about the individual’s own company. The reading for December 2009 was 56.6 points, which was an increase of 6.3 points and also the first time that net positive opinions outweighed net negatives among the roughly 300 respondents. The forecast into 2010 calls for a 6.5 point increase in confidence over the next six months.

Perhaps even more exciting from a channel standpoint: roughly one-third of the IT executives responding to CompTIA plan to boost their capital expenditures in the next six months. The majority expect global IT spending to be between 2 percent and 4 percent this year, with the U.S. market slightly behind that number. The top market opportunities include security products and services, healthcare IT, green IT and virtualization. Yes, that is not a mistake, green IT is listed BEFORE virtualization.

Two other notable trends to mention:

• 75 percent of the respondents expect consumer technologies to keep playing a large role in enterprise technology solutions
• 80 percent believe businesses will begin adopting alternative delivery models, such as software as a service, more quickly

The CDW IT Monitor likewise is trending more positive. Almost half of the 1,047 IT decision-makers responding to the survey last November (48 percent) report that budgets will increase during the first six months of this year. That’s an increase of 9 percentage points since the October data was released. Approximately 76 percent of them expect to replace or install new software. (Hmm, Microsoft Windows 7 team, are you listening to that?)

The overall confidence levels reflected in the latest CDW research haven’t been seen since August 2008.

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Flash forward nine months and McManus is grappling with the opportunities and challenges of the expanded product set he inherited last summer after several Fujitsu operating divisions were consolidated into Fujitsu America. Whereas before McManus was supporting many partners with very discrete practices focused on mobility, servers and storage, now he is focused on helping Fujitsu’s resellers realize the full potential of Fujitsu’s product line — selling more total solutions into their accounts.

He has already seen many of his partners, for example, extend into storage, where McManus points to a 60 percent increase in installed base over the past 12 months. Now, Fujitsu is establishing relationships that will help it establish a deeper footprint in the retail POS space. Earlier this month, the company signed a distribution pact with a major distributor in that space, ScanSource. Under the pact, ScanSource will represent the Fujitsu TeamPOS series of terminals and peripherals.

Another area that will unfold this year involves how McManus can involve more Fujitsu VARs in selling more Fujitsu-designed services. Since another very high ranking channel executive at a different company mentioned the same thing to me this week, I’m betting this becomes an area of heightened conversation and potential conflict over 2010 — as vendors look to improve their margins and VARs seek to maintain their services differentiation.

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Regulators had held up the purchase over worries that Oracle ownership of the popular (Sun-owned)  MySQL database would hurt competition. But, after investigating, the commission found “that although MySQL and Oracle compete in certain parts of the database market, they are not close competitors in others, such as the high-end segment.”

And, it found that PostgreSQL–another open-source database–is a credible alternative to MySQL.

Oracle got a jump on the news Wednesday night, blasting out an invitation to a Jan. 27 event at which Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will outline hardware and software futures.

According to the invitation:

 Only Oracle + Sun will be able to:

 

• Offer a broad range of products, including servers, storage, networking, and software
• Integrate all customer components—servers, operating system, storage, database, middleware, and applications—for unmatched performance, reliability, and security
• Simplify IT management and reduce system deployment and integration costs
• Continue to drive innovation in SPARC, Solaris, the Java platform, and many other technologies

 

 Now, Sun and Oracle VARs  and IT shops can sort out for real how the $7.4 billion buyout will affect their businesses.

Some Sun hardware VARs have been very concerned about Oracle ownership of Sun’s Sparc franchise and have shifted at least some resources to other hardware lines.  Oracle resellers are concerned that Sun hardware partners will enter the already tough market for selling Oracle software licenses and are not happy about that.

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