June, 2009

Is Virtual Iron virtually gone?

A few months ago when we examined whether Oracle could be a contender in the virtualization wars, experts said that the company faced an uphill battle if it continued to refuse offering support for third-party virtualization software.  They also noted that Oracle would most likely buy Virtual Iron to compliment its own Oracle VM.

It looks like they were right.

Just over a month after buying the virtualization software vendor Virtual Iron, Oracle has announced that it will be getting rid of the company’s products.  According to an article in The Register, Oracle said in a letter to Virtual Iron’s sales partners that it “will suspend development of existing Virtual Iron products and will suspend delivery of orders to new customers.”

While this may not come as a surprise to many, it’s interesting that Oracle has decided to forgo what keeping Virtual Iron could have brought to the table in terms of products for small and medium-sized companies.

Also interesting, as The Register’s Carl Metz points out, is that Oracle would risk losing Virtual Iron customers and partners, who will be justifiably unhappy upon hearing this news.  Oracle stated that after the end of this month it will not allow partners to sell new licenses to anyone, even existing customers.

Do you think it’s unfair to Virtual Iron customers and irresponsible for Oracle to slash VI’s  products with such short notice? While Virtual Iron customers can move to Oracle’s new combined product, Oracle has yet to say when it will be arriving, or what the combined product will actually be.

And is this any indication of what Oracle will do with Sun’s virtualization products? With its acquisition of Sun, Oracle will get Sun’s entire virtualization portfolio namely Sun xVM.  Sun xVM, like Oracle (and Virtual Iron), is based on the Xen hypervisor, making it easier for Oracle to combine products.

It should be interesting to see how Oracle’s virtualization plans develop over the coming months, and if it will prove effective in competing against virtualization kingpin, VMware.

How will Oracle do when the chips are down?

The good thing about Sun canceling development of its 16-core Rock processor means Oracle now has one less set of multi-core servers to fret over with its cores vs. processor licensing policy. The bad news is the new Oracle, hoping to compete against the likes of IBM and Hewlett-Packard from chips to business process software will come to battle with a few less bullets.

I am only half kidding, of course, about the good news part. For better or worse (worse many users say) Oracle doesn’t fret much over whether it should license servers by the processor core or by the box. It unflinchingly continues to license by the number of cores, which could prove an expensive proposition for some buyers.

The bad news I may not be kidding about so much. With Sun kicking its five-year old Rock project to the curb, Oracle can’t make the next leap in the game of performance leapfrog it plays with chip rivals IBM and Intel.

In fact, Sun has failed to leap a couple of times having canceled its UltraSparc-V chip project earlier this decade because it essentially ran out of development funds. The company rushed out its UltraSparc-IV chip as a stop-gap product that didn’t do much. And when Sun was skipping a leap, a couple of other times it was very slow to leap, being months even years late in delivering a new chip.

Sun officials have talked consistently the past few years about the Rock being a game changer. The chip was designed to achieve a much higher per-thread and floating point performance, along with greater Symmetrical Multi-Processing capabilities than its Niagra family of chips.

Rock, which was to anchor the company’s Supernova line of servers, was supposed to really shine when it came to handling high-end data facing workloads including database servers. Just guessing here, but I think a machine delivering great database performance would be important to Oracle.

With Rock out of the game Sun will continue to use Fujitsu processors, which will be fine, but hardly represents the game changer the company was hoping for. One positive aspect to all this is that Sun’s research and development costs just got significantly lower. This won’t make Larry Ellison unhappy as he tries to complete the $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun.

But once again Sun has opened the door wide open for a number of competitors to rush through, most notably IBM. With one less competitor at the high end, IBM figures to rip away more server market share from Sun over the short term. Some speculated over the last day or so that Oracle might start to emphasize the next gen Niagra III Sparc chips, as well as pushing Solaris on x64 servers fueled by Intel’s upcoming Nehalem EX servers.

Sun has been relying on chips from Fujitsu for its larger servers while it waited for the Rock development to be finished. Now it is likely to just continue using Fujitsu chips, which should lower research and development costs.

But what does the lack of a “game-changing” chip like Rock do to Oracle’s plans to sell vertically integrated hardware-software stacks (as has been rumored) ala its Exadata Database Machine? It could hurt its newly acquired hardware business for sure, but perhaps more importantly hold back its flagship database business at the high end in some key markets, along with other proprietary and open source software offerings.

We knew Oracle was buying some damaged goods with its acquisition of Sun, but I am not sure if Redwood Shores was assuming its chip business might be this damaged.

Oracle should support the Open Database Alliance now

Ed Scannell

Oracle’s continued lack of public enthusiasm, let’s call it, about gaining possession over MySQL Server continues to puzzle me.

The folks at Redwood Shores certainly haven’t indicated they will abandon the popular open-source data base, but neither have they acknowledged what the strategic importance to its overall data base fortunes might be.

I know Oracle can’t offer up too many specifics about its plans for MySQL until its acquisition of Sun is complete (the latest speculation is that approval may not come now until at least September over some concerns expressed by the European Union). But it could do a better job of making a general statement or two about its potential value, which might go a long way towards making its customers using Oracle and MySQL databases side by side feel more assured.

The company shouldn’t wait too much longer to do that.

A couple of weeks ago, Monty Widenius, MySQL’s founder who left Sun before the Oracle deal, has formed an independent vendor-neutral consortium that will serve as a hub to create and maintain code and binaries, as well as offer training and technical support for MySQL.

The fledgling organization, called the Open Database Alliance, will supply a range of software and services for Widenius’ fork of the MySQL MariaDB version of the product. The group will not wait for Oracle’s endorsement or formal participation.

At the announcement of the Alliance Widenius expressed more than a little concern that MySQL’s development efforts could be set back years if Oracle either lets the product languish without regular updates, or lays off many of the product’s programmers at Sun once the deal is completed.

Widenius pledged to work closely with those MySQL developers at Sun, to prevent a significant forking of the code which would fracture an otherwise united development community. This, of course, could result in diluting the product’s competitive powers against Microsoft, or make it less attractive to Oracle shops as a departmental-level compliment to its higher-end databases.

Not just that. Some of Oracle’s database competitors could join the new consortium and make technical contributions to MySQL. It is hard to imagine that Oracle would be comfortable with that scenario having just paid over $7 billion for Sun.

Widenius also made it clear his new organization is quite open to any company or individuals joining in the group. Given there are only the two founding members who have joined - namely Monty Program Ab and Percona - new members are likely to have more than a little influence in the product’s direction.

I have already written about MySQL’s more obvious advantages to Oracle’s data base business: a strong lower-end compliment to Oracle’s proprietary line of data bases that could effectively compete against Microsoft; another source of maintenance revenues; and a way for Oracle to take a leadership position in the open source world and improve its credibility there.

No matter what Oracle’s longer range plans are for MySQL, the company would be wise to throw The Open Database Alliance a bone soon, letting it know it intends to work cooperatively. It would be good for not only MySQL users and developers, but for its own strategic good.

Oracle edges closer to final approval of Sun deal

Last week, Larry Ellison spoke publicly for the first time about the Oracle-Sun deal. At Sun’s annual JavaOne conference, Ellison revealed his plans for using Java on mobile devices and swapping AJAX for Java FX on Sun’s OpenOffice product.

But when will we actually see these proposed changes take place?

We’ll be one step closer to knowing the answer to that question next month, when Sun stockholders will meet to vote on Oracle’s proposed acquisition.  Sun announced today that this meeting will take place on July 16. If it goes through, the approval will mark the end of more than seven months of negotiations between Sun and interested buyers such as Oracle, IBM and HP, according to eWeek.

Oracle first announced its agreement to acquire Sun on April 20. Until now, the software giant has remained tight-lipped on the deal, with only a brief mention of it at the Collaborate ‘09 conference in May.

But now, even with the recent announcements at JavaOne, many questions remained unanswered about the future of Sun, especially surrounding what exactly Oracle plans to do with Sun’s hardware business.

An article today in ComputerWorld suggests that Sun customers remain skeptical about Oracle’s plans for Sun and the assurances made by Ellison at the JavaOne conference.

The Sun customers interviewed in the ComputerWorld article were concerned about the future of a variety of Sun’s technologies, including Java, its Sparc architecture and its free GlassFish open-source application server.

Others were nervous not just about the technologies, but the future of the JavaOne conference itself. One attendee was quoted as saying that the conference had “the look and feel of being the end of the road for JavaOne… It was hard not to get a sense that this was the last one.”

In a recent blog post, JavaWorld’s Dustin Marx also speculates that Oracle will not continue to hold the annual conference.  First, he points out that in the current economy, it may not be feasible for Oracle to hold both Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne and still make money. Marx also points out that Oracle already has many Java-related presentations at its Oracle OpenWorld conference, and simply expanding those offerings would not be too difficult.

We’ve already looked at how the Oracle-Sun deal will affect you, but as the approval of the proposed acquisition gets closer, new questions are beginning to emerge, on everything from Oracle licensing to the future of Java and JavaOne.

As more details of the Oracle-Sun deal start to surface, what new questions or concerns do you have?  As an Oracle customer what do you think about what the Sun customers have to say? Are their concerns justified? Leave a comment or talk about this in our Oracle-Sun discussion on the IT Knowledge Exchange.

The biggest ain’t always the best when choosing an Oracle vendor

If you were asked to choose between IBM Global Services and the lesser known Solution Beacon for your consulting needs, which would you choose?

Hint: don’t be too quick to pick IBM. It seems that when it comes to picking a vendor or consultant, IT professionals believe larger more global companies such as IBM or Oracle aren’t always the preferred choice.

According to a VendorRate Trade Show report from Collaborate ‘09 in Orlando last month, Solution Beacon was the highest rated vendor of the approximately 200 attending the show.  The lowest rated vendor was Business Objects, with Oracle Consulting, Deloitte Consulting, Microsoft, BMC Software, ADP, Symantec Enterprise Storage and Verizon Wireless rounding out the bottom, according to the report.

VendorRate collected responses at Collaborate from nearly 400 IT professionals, who rated the vendors on a scale of 1 to 10 in 10 categories, including communication, timeliness, usability, reliability and customer service.

Three of the lowest rated vendors provide global consulting services. In a BusinessWire article, VendorRate CEO Rick Schaefer is quoted as saying, “Small and medium sized vendors continually score at the top of the charts while the big consulting organizations receive the lowest scores.”

Joining Solution Beacon at the top was Feith Systems & Software, Quest Software, Sun Microsystems Server, Oracle Software, Dell, HP and TUSC.

Here are a few of the highest and lowest scorers in specific categories, according to the report:

Best in Expertise: Solution Beacon and Sun Microsystems

Best in Communication: TUSC

Best in Recommend: Feist Systems and Software

Lowest in Recommend: ADP

Lowest in Timeliness: BusinessObjects

Lowest in Reliability: Microsoft

What do you think of these results?  Do they surprise you?

Oracle drops the E-Business Suite requirement for Warehouse Management app

Are you an Oracle user who wants all the latest warehouse management capabilities, but can’t always afford to update to the latest version of E-Business Suite?

Then today’s your lucky day.

A new version of Oracle Warehouse Management, released June 1, allows users to deploy the warehouse management application as a distributed product.  Users no longer have to be an E-Business Suite customer to use the application, as was required in earlier versions.

Oracle Warehouse Management can now either stand alone or be deployed as a module within E-Business Suite, giving customers the choice between an integrated or standalone product, according to Oracle’s Warehouse Management blog.

And that’s not its only enhancement — Oracle Warehouse Management will also be integrated more closely with Oracle’s transportation management application. According to Managing Automation, Oracle recently announced that Oracle Warehouse Management and Oracle Transportation Management have new integration points — such as load sequencing and cross docking — that indicate a plan to offer the applications together as a best-of-breed logistics management suite.

Other new capabilities with this release include advanced wave planning, task planning, demand-driven forward pick replenishment and high-volume performance, according to Oracle.

What’s behind all these changes?

Oracle Warehouse Management was originally built for industrial manufacturing and high-tech sectors. However, the product has evolved to have more appeal for higher volume environments such as wholesale distributors, food and beverage, life sciences and consumer packaged goods, according to Jennifer Sherman, Oracle senior director of logistics product strategy, in this Logistics Management article.

Moving forward, it will be interesting to see how new features such as these allow Oracle to compete with best-of- breed warehouse management systems.  If you’re an E-Business Suite user (or a non-EBS user who can now use the application), how will these extended capabilities help you?