In the case of Ellison, he seems to have been wrong about cloud computing, having made it the subject of a now fairly well-known rant. Oracle really dragged their feet on cloud for a while, promoting both Exalogic systems (which is kind of like a cloud-in-a-box) and private clouds first.

Three years post-rant, Ellison seems to finally have changed his mind about the cloud, while attempting to hint that his hesitance was all for show in the first place. Oracle has recently acquired several firms that use cloud technology, including RightNow, Taleo and ClearTrial. What caused this change?

While we could point to petty rivalries between CEOs, I think it’s really more that it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the cloud isn’t going away. The folks at Oracle being sharp business people, they know it’s better to jump on the cloud bandwagon late than never – and doing that Oracle-style means buying up a few companies and folding their technology into your own (like they did with Sun when they decided to get into hardware a few years ago).

We’ll have to see how this develops, but the general consensus seems to be that Oracle is in fairly good position to succeed in this new field, if only due to their acquisitions. It will be interesting to watch how Oracle’s adoption of this technology plays out.

They’re designed to be super-easy to implement and set up (they’re wizard-based). They allow for the connection of recent releases of Oracle E-Business Suite and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne transaction systems to the Oracle Business Intelligence dashboards, which is really pretty nifty. They also allow you to configure your data warehouse based on your company’s industry leading business flows.

They’re only available through Oracle’s Partner Network, and sometimes Oracle Consulting. So far, it doesn’t work with any other vendor’s products, but I’ll be curious to see if they eventually branch out and make it interoperable with other products on the market, as Oracle is known to sometimes do.

The intention seems to be to bring big-business data analysis benefits to midsize IT shops. Many have remarked in recent years that business intelligence is becoming a commodity. Oracle, long having had the reputation of database of the 1%, is now attempting to position itself as bringer of BI to the masses.

How’s that working out for them? Well, we’ll see — does anyone in our audience use Oracle Business Accelerators for Oracle Business Intelligence? If so, how’s it working out for you? Send us an email at  editor at searchoracle.com – We promise to keep your identify a secret, but we’d love to know what you think.

A few months ago, the buzz was that SAP might just do the unthinkable and license certain applications for use to Oracle. Since Oracle and SAP are kind of sort of kind of mortal enemies at this point, it seemed pretty shocking at the time.

Well, no more wondering when and if such a thing is going to happen for real, since it just did.

As of Monday, April 30, Oracle announced that SAP applications are now certified for use with Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4, and SAP infrastructure and applications based on the SAP NetWeaver technology platform 6.4 and above and certified with Oracle Database 11g Release 2, such as the SAP ERP application and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, can now be deployed using the SPARC SuperCluster T4 4. Oracle also made sure to point out that “…the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 provides an optimized platform for SAP environments that can reduce configuration times by up to 75 percent (1), reduce operating costs up to 50 percent(2), can improve query performance by up to 10x(3), and can improve daily data loading up to 4x(4).”

Long story short- While SAP and Oracle might not be BFFs just yet, they do seem to realize that their software has the potential to integrate very well. It will be interesting to whether this ushers is a new era of cooperation between Oracle and SAP… or not.

The Collaborate show floor is always a fun one to check out. The Oracle users groups conference, taking place in Las Vegas, always has a few interesting things in the exhibit hall worth checking out. Here are a few of them:

Elephant cake. Yep, a cake made in the shape of an elephant. I didn’t try any, but I heard it was pretty good.

A big bin of Legos. Nice. Too bad my 3-year-old son isn’t a conference attendee. I played with this for about five minutes. People building things with the Legos got a free T-shirt from the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG). Or you could get an apron too, if you wanted.

Some mini-golf. Most of these people were better putters than Tiger Woods has been lately.

A little skee ball never hurt anyone. Too bad they didn’t have the little ticket dispenser at the bottom though.

Want a tattoo? This guy was doing temporary tattoos that last five days. They have like 100 different designs.

And yep, I got a tattoo. Can’t wait until I show my wife. Let’s just say I’m not going to tell her it’s temporary right away. Looking forward the expression on her face.

Townsend had been with Oracle since 1991, and was known for having tight connections with Oracle Database end users. He was supportive of the Oracle ACE program and, according to some, was instrumental in helping Oracle Database Express Edition see the light of day.

I first heard about Townsend’s death while sitting in on a session at Collaborate, the Oracle user group conference in Las Vegas this week. The session was “Oracle Database - Engineered for Innovation” and was scheduled to be given by Townsend. Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) President Andy Flower took the mic and told the audience that Townsend had died. Michael Timpanaro-Perrotta, director of product management for Oracle Database Cloud, gave the presentation in Townsend’s place.

The night before, Townsend was honored by the IOUG during the user group’s welcome session and social gathering. The IOUG had planned on presenting Townsend with the Ken Jacobs Award, given to one Oracle employee each year for their dedication to the user group community. Flower said that Townsend was “instrumental in nurturing the positive relationship” between the IOUG and Oracle. Jacobs received the award on behalf of Townsend and his family.

Townsend did know that he would receive the award before he died. In an email he sent to Flower, he wrote:

Wow - thanks very much. Not sure I can measure up to the great example set by Ken but genuinely very happy to receive thanks. Please send my thanks to the board - it is a pleasure to work with all of them. …we at Oracle appreciate all the hard work you all do on behalf of the Oracle users.

Townsend was involved with the Relay for Life within the American Cancer Society, and you can still donate to his cause.

Many philosophical questions are being asked in this trial; Can you copyright a programing language?  Does copyright law protect original works of creative expression, or does its reach also cover the tools used to create those works? The outcome of this trial (and the extrapolated answers to these questions) may go on to shape intellectual property law, as well as the tech industry, for decades to come.

Many revelations have already come out of the trial — first, that Steve Jobs’ dying wish was apparently to avenge his beloved iPhone by punishing the people who created what he saw as a cheap knock-off. Perhaps it’s ironic that Jobs’ good friend Larry Ellison gets to be the one to bring Google to trial, even if not overtly to posthumously avenge his friend, but rather his righteous moral indignation at this flagrant flouting of intellectual property. Another scintillating revelation is that Oracle once considered buying Canadian company RIM in order to break into the mobile phone industry; this disclosure has promoted some to imagine what Oracle and RIM would look like had this deal actually been brokered.

Wednesday was dubbed “CEO Day,” with both Larrys — Page, CEO of Google, and Ellison, CEO of Oracle — taking the stand. Both had flaws in their testimony — Larry Page was evasive with Oracle’s lawyer to the point where Judge Alsup eventually told him, “You’ve got to say ‘yes,’ ‘no’ or ‘I don’t know…You must do that.” Larry Ellison announced that he didn’t know if Java was free and contradicted his statements.

Additionally, Oracle has been pointing to a “smoking gun” memo sent by Google exec Andy Rubin to Larry Page stating that they ought to “pay Sun for their technology.”

This trial has been every bit the roller coaster ride we all assumed it would be, complete with vengeance from beyond the grave, secret incriminating memos and philosophical reflection. But, with both Oracle and Google involved, did we really expect anything less?

The most critical issues are in Fusion Middleware, followed by Oracle Database and Sun products. This patch is larger than the last one in January, which had 78 fixes. There are six fixes withing Oracle Database Server, including three that could remotely exploited without authentication. Components affected include Application Express and Oracle Spatial. There are 11 fixes for Fusion Middleware, nine of which could be remotely exploited without authentication. Components affected include BI Publisher, Identity Manager and Oracle JDeveloper. There are 15 fixes for Sun products, including five which could be remotely exploited without authentication. Components affected include Solaris, Sparc M-series servers, and GlassFish.

Other fixes:

• 6 for Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control
• 4 for Oracle E-Business Suite
• 5 for Oracle Supply Chain products
• 15 for PeopleSoft
• 2 for Oracle Industry Applications
• 17 for Oracle financial services software
• 1 for Primavera
• 6 for MySQL

But does it matter? Do you bother to implement patches as soon as they come out, or are there other steps involved before you do that? Let us know in the comments.

This move on Oracle’s part has raised a few eyebrows, as Oracle seems to be moving into the realm of big pharma. It would make perfect sense for Oracle to do so – it’s a field that meshes well with Oracle’s expertise in big data, is always in demand, and has a multitude of big name, stable clients. ClearTrial’s customers include Allergan (maker of Botox), Sanofi (producer of Allegra) and AstraZeneca, the seventh-largest pharmaceutical company in the world.

Indeed, with this acquisition, Oracle has established a vertical market for itself in the field of health IT. Oracle can now be your one-stop -shop for everything you need for your clinical trial, from finding volunteers to analyzing your data. The folks at Oracle are generally fans of this business strategy – another example of this would be their recent activity in the CRM field, where they also seem very interested in establishing a vertical market. This is consistent with their acquisition strategy across the board. They’ve been eyeing industry specific software acquisitions, particularly in an effort to continue competing with boutique software firms to be the best in each industry.

Oracle itself states quite clearly on their website the benefits of working within a vertical industry: “The vertical analytic applications are specific industry extensions or flavors of BI Applications that enable organizations to realize the value of a packaged analytic application, such as rapid deployment, lower TCO, and built-in best practices, while also being able to very easily extend those solutions to meet their specific needs in that industry - all on one common BI architecture.”

What are Oracle’s long-term plans in health sciences? Only time will tell… Oracle can be a bit of a wild card, and it’s hard to guess their next move, but this blogger wouldn’t be shocked to see them begin making the baby steps to move deeper into the pharmaceutical industry.

Oracle had 48.8% of the market in 2011, according to Gartner. That was up from 48.2% in 2010. IBM with its DB2 database and Microsoft with its SQL Server databases were 20.2% and 17%, respectively. Thanks to Colleen Graham, a research director at Gartner, I have the rundown:

As you can see, Oracle’s growth was the largest in terms of raw dollars, and second largest in terms of percentage. The largest percentage growth went to SAP/Sybase, which already has Sybase databases and is trying to ramp up its database business further with the SAP HANA in-memory appliance. But its percentage growth is largely because it was starting from a smaller base. Can SAP really be the #2 database vendor by 2015, as it hopes to be? For that to happen, it would have to at least quadruple its database business in the next four years.

In the case of the ill-fated Itanium chip, multiple companies, including HP and Intel, got a lesson in failure. The now famous debacle has been coined “the joke of the chip industry” by tech blogger Ashlee Vance and the phrase Itanic gets bandied about from time to time. Much of the computing world has more or less decided to move on and, as of March 23, 2011, Oracle made it clear that they would no longer be developing products that would be supported by Itanium. HP responded by suing Oracle. Oracle being Oracle, countersued. The rest, as they say, is history. Oracle hiring many HP alumni for high-level positions exacerbates the bad blood between the two companies as well.

The two were set to go to trial on May 31st, but are now asking a federal judge to settle the matter out of court. No one really seems to know why, but my suspicion is that HP realized they really have no court case to speak of — while Oracle was being their usual mind-game playing selves, they weren’t doing anything illegal.

What is there to learn from this?

What I came away with is that the business world really is a lot like elementary school. Kid A (HP) gets mad because Kid B (Oracle) won’t be their best friend (continue using their famously bad Itanium chips). So, Kid A tells the teacher (sues in court) that Kid B is guilty of various classroom infractions (breach of contract, etc). Everyone gets all up in arms, and it looks for a bit like Kid B might really be in trouble. Kid B tells the teacher that Kid A is actually the bad kid (countersues), and then starts hanging out with a bunch of Kid A’s former friends (hires former employees), making fun of Kid A the whole time. In the end, though, it turns out that Kid B, while being a generally jerky kid, hasn’t actually done anything against the rules. Both kids ask the hall monitor (federal court judge) to sort the whole thing out. Within a few weeks, both parties will probably be going to each other’s birthday parties (signing new contracts for different products) and picking on other kids (suing other companies).