Oracle to issue 78 security fixes

Oracle is scheduled to release 78 fixes on Tuesday as part of its quarterly security patch update.

Oracle MySQL will receive the most fixes with 27, while Oracle Sun products will have the highest security vulnerabilities. The patch will be for the following products:

• 27 for MySQL
• 17 for Sun products
• 11 for Fusion Middleware
• Eight for JD Edwards
• Six for PeopleSoft
• Three for E-Business Suite
• Three for Oracle’s virtualization software
• Two for Oracle Database
• One for Oracle’s supply chain software

The remaining security patch releases for 2012 are expected on April 17, July 17 and October 16.

Oracle Exalytics hardware pricing to start at $135,000

Oracle changed its price list this week, adding prices for its Exalytics business intelligence appliance and the TimesTen in-memory database software to go with it.

As Chris Kanaracus from the IDG News Service noted, the price list change suggests that an announcement for general availability of Exalytics should be coming soon. According to the price list, the Exalytics hardware costs $135,000. That includes a single 3U Oracle-Sun server with four 10-core Intel Xeon processors and 1 TB of memory. Support and licensing for it runs another approximately $30,000 per year.

But then we get into software pricing for the machine. The TimesTen software is $366 per user for named-user plus ($300 for licensing, $66 for support) or about $42,000 per processor. There’s more. According to the price list notes, Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite is required for Exalytics, with the number of licenses matching that for TimesTen. According to a different Oracle price list, BI Foundation Suite is about $4,500 per user or about $550,000 per processor. Yeah. It adds up quickly.

That said, this is all list price. Customers can often negotiate 70% discounts or even steeper.

Third-party Oracle support shows increased interest

Rimini Street Inc., a third-party Oracle support provider, this morning posted revenue numbers for the fourth quarter last year and for all of 2011. Both were up about 30% compared to the prior year’s period.

The numbers show that many Oracle (and SAP) end users are trying to get more life out of their software than Oracle and SAP often want. They also show that there are plenty of IT pros out there who have come around to considering and using third-party support, something that really wasn’t considered just a short time ago. Rimini supports Oracle Database and a host of Oracle applications such as E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards and Siebel.

In general, more Oracle end users are considering third-party support providers. In a 2010 survey, 32% of SearchOracle.com readers said they always consider third-party support. That number jumped to 41% in 2011.

According to the numbers, Rimini Street had about $33 million in revenues last year. Now let’s be honest: That is an absolute drop in the bucket compared to Oracle’s overall revenues, and even compared to Oracle’s support revenues. Just to give you an idea, Oracle’s licensing and support revenues last year was close to $16 billion. That’s with a B, compared to $33 million with an M. And if you talk to Rimini executives, they’ll say as much. For them, it just means they still have plenty of room to continue growing.

And if you think Oracle isn’t noticing companies like Rimini, you would be wrong. Oracle is spending a lot of money to sue Rimini Street, claiming Rimini has stolen Oracle software and support materials through Rimini’s clients. Rimini is denying the charges, of course. The lawsuit was initially filed in 2010. There are more hearings set on the case this year.

Top 5 Oracle stories on SearchOracle.com in 2011

Well, it’s 2012! But please allow me one quick look back. Here is a list of the top 5 Oracle stories on SearchOracle.com in 2011, ranked both by news importance and page views on SearchOracle.com. These are in no particular order.

Exaportfolio and other hardware

First is Oracle’s additions and updates to what I’m calling its Exaportfolio. Exadata, Exalogic, and now, Exalytics. Exalytics is built for business intelligence, and has the TimesTen in-memory database built into it along with Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite. It is yet another attempt by Oracle to sell its integrated appliances. It also previewed its Big Data Appliance meant to run Hadoop and Oracle’s new NoSQL Database Enterprise Edition inside. Are you thinking of buying up one of these integrated appliances?
Read our Exadata and Exalogicserver guides, and check out why Exalytics might be a better comparison to SAP HANA than any previous Oracle appliance.

And don’t forget about the other hardware announcements Oracle made this year: the Sparc SuperCluster and the Oracle Database Appliance.

Fusion Applications

The year 2011 was yet another year for Oracle Fusion Applications. For most it meant another year of waiting for Fusion to come to fruition. But there were some stories that trickled out of actual companies using Fusion Applications in production through Oracle’s early adoption program. Principal Financial Group was the first, as Oracle started telling its story earlier in the year, and then Principal expounded on it later, when Oracle Fusion Applications became generally availableat Openworld. In other case, Patrick Gresham, the enterprise applications manager for a fast food chain, detailed how his company decided to move to Fusion. Finally, at Openworld some Fusion CRM early adopters told their stories.

That said, there are still many concerns around whether most customers are ready to adopt Fusion.

Oracle Support

Customer and technical support is a challenge when dealing with most vendors, but it appears to be even more acute when it comes to Oracle. Earlier in 2011 we published a story questioning whether the phrase Oracle Support is an oxymoron. Readers came back at us with a flurry of comments, most of them negative. Experts at a local Oracle users group meetinglater in the year echoed readers’ feelings. At Oracle Openworld, we scored an interview with Oracle President Mark Hurd, where we asked him about it. His response? That support is critical to Oracle.

Oracle reaches for the cloud

At Oracle Openworld, the company announced Oracle Public Cloud. Initially the Oracle Public Cloud will include two Fusion Applications, CRM and Human Capital Management. In the future it is also projected to include a social network and Oracle Database, among other things. Needless to say many experts said Oracle was a bit late to the game, what with Amazon and Salesforce.com among others having already dived headfirst into the cloud. There were also stories of Oracle customers dipping their toes into cloud computing. AT&T is eyeing hybrid cloud computing, for example. And Floyd Teter, a well-known name in the Oracle applications universe, said that Fusion Apps being available in the cloud is a big deal.

Oracle is still also trying to push Exalogic as a “cloud in a box,” and consultant Eric Guyer scrutinized that claim. Other Oracle experts opined in August on Oracle’s place in the cloud, before the Public Cloud announcement.

Watch out for Oracle license audits

Another story published by SearchOracle.com in 2011 that gained some headway was our two-part series on Oracle licensing audits. The first warned the reader about audits, outlining how they usually come about and the reasons behind them. The second went into further depth about an Oracle license audit - what happens during them and how end users can avoid license auditing traps. The stories led to editor Mark Fontecchio being invited to present during a Miro Consulting webinar on license auditing.

Oracle holiday wish list

Earlier this week we sent out a note asking Oracle end users for their holiday wish lists. We got a wide range of responses, including requests for big box items like Exadata all the way down to detailed features such as schema-level privileges. How about you, what are you hoping out of Oracle in the next year? Comment here or email us at editor@searchoracle.com. Here are some responses:

Oracle becomes OpenSource - maybe Santa has the power to deliver…
–
1. Oracle 11g XE for 64-bit Windows!
2. Give me back the “old” Java-based “Enterprise Console Manager.”
–
Exadata !!!
–
APEX for my Oracle DB reporting.
–
Schema-level privileges.  Come on, it’s been decades.
Also how about: Alter username rename to new_username.
–
Ironically, I do not have a Christmas wish list for Oracle this year.  While a bit on the pricey side, I must say that the Oracle relational database software, which is what we primarily use and are running Oracle11g Release 2 on Linux and Solaris, has been very stable, scalable, and performs reasonably well.  I am pleased with Oracle’s quarterly critical patch update schedule and process, and have come to depend on Oracle as the workhorse database engine alongside SQL Server 2008 R2 and MySQL.  So I guess my only wish is that Oracle continue to advance and improve the relational database product line and doesn’t break anything in the process.

Oracle boosts sales staff, cuts product support

Such is Wall Street that when your revenue increases 2.5% year-over-year, and your net income increases 17%, that your stock plummets like your company is going out of business.

This is a world of expectations, and according to financial analysts, Oracle missed them all over the place. While software revenue was up almost 7% in the last quarter, hardware revenue dive-bombed 14%. Of course Oracle execs had their reason ready: According to them, the transition from Sparc T3 to T4 delayed orders by some customers. Wait, I thought the focus of Oracle hardware was its Exaportfolio, ie. Exadata, Exalogic, and Exalytics? Right? Suddenly a Sparc chip transition causes this much of a hiccup? OK…

On the expenses side, it is interesting to note that Oracle increased its sales and marketing budget by almost 11% compared to the same quarter last year. Oracle President Mark Hurd made a point of it, saying that Oracle has put “1,700 incremental sales resources into the field” since the beginning of the company’s fiscal year, which started in September.

Hurd added that Oracle has shown “strong expense discipline” while adding sales staff. Yep, that sounds about right. Hardware products and support expenses dropped 10% and 28%, respectively. Software licensing and product support expenses were also down 3% year over year. In other words, Oracle sales and marketing has been trending up since early 2010, while investment in Oracle products and support has been trending down.

What does this mean? Well, many Oracle customers complain that once they become Oracle customers, Oracle tends to forget about them. Hurd denied this in an interview at Oracle OpenWorld earlier this year. But the company’s SEC filings paint a picture of a company with a boosted sales staff and declining product and support budgets.

Oracle Weblogic 12c announced; reactions abound

Oracle announced Weblogic 12c during a live webinar on Thursday. The new version of the company’s Java-based application server is its first major release since Weblogic 11g more than two years ago. Back then, the “g” stood for grid. This time around, the “c” stands for cloud.

Weblogic is the second “c” product Oracle has released this year - earlier it announced Enterprise Manager 12c. Needless to say, after years of CEO Larry Ellison making fun of the word “cloud,” Oracle has now embraced it, or at least the first letter anyway. It is expected to be available for download next Thursday. Needless to say, here are the main takeaways as I saw them:

• Oracle Weblogic 12c is meant as an application server for multiple platforms - conventional servers, Oracle appliances like Exalogic, and in the cloud.
• Weblogic 12c is certified for Java Enterprise Edition (EE) 6.
• It is meant as a piece of what Oracle is calling its Cloud Application Foundation (picture below).

Now, for some reactions. Simon Haslam, an Oracle ACE director and chair of the U.K. Oracle Users Group special interest group on middleware, noted that the zip installer for developers has been “slimmed down,” making it easier for download.

Haslam mentioned that an announcement that came with Weblogic 12c was Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder, which will allow Oracle pros to “design and deploy pre-defined collections of ready installed Virtual Machines into different environments (not unlike VMware vCenter Orchestrator).” Haslam thinks it’s a big deal, but he’s not sure whether it will be ready for production out of the gate.

Al Hilwa, applications development software director for IDC, wrote the same note to us and to ReadWriteWeb, which published a story on the release. Basically he says the certification for Java EE 6 is a big deal because it brings it “in commercial form” to Oracle Fusion Middleware shops.

“Adoption of new versions of Java EE typically moves slowly in the enterprise but offering a certified implementation of the standard framework moves the commercial user migration process along,” he wrote.

Finally, Michel Schildmeijer, an Oracle Fusion Middleware architect at Dutch IT consultancy AMIS Technologies, wrote that he was impressed with Weblogic 12c’s integration with Oracle Exalogic. He added that Weblogic 12c’s value will come when other Oracle products move to 12c as well.

“WebLogic 12c will be ready for all kinds of other products from the Oracle portfolio like the SOA Suite, WebCenter and so on, although those products will be at the 12c level in the coming 2012/2013 year,” he wrote.

Floyd Teter: Oracle Fusion SaaS is a big deal

Floyd Teter knows there were a lot of big announcements at Oracle OpenWorld this year. But the biggest one, he said, was the announcement that Fusion Applications will be available in the Oracle Public Cloud.

Teter is the project management director at Innowave Technology and has long been an important figure in the Oracle applications community. He has also been involved in Oracle Fusion Applications - its development, testing and roll-out.

“Although there was a plethora of significant developments – Exalytics, Pre-Release of EBS 12.2, the continued evolution of APEX, the General Availability announcement of Fusion Applications, the Oracle Public Clound, Big Data – none of those, in and of themselves, was the single most important piece of news in my opinion,” Teter wrote. “The news that grabbed my attention and continues to grab my attention: the inclusion of Fusion Applications CRM and HCM in the Oracle Public Cloud.”

Teter explained that a company building out Fusion Applications in-house requires a lot of expensive infrastructure to do it - hardware, memory, network, etc. That might be OK for large organizations such as Principal Financial Group. But smaller organizations probably won’t be able to afford it.

“But now we’ve got Fusion Applications being offered through the Oracle Public Cloud as a service…yup, a SaaS offering (for those of you who dig trendy acronyms),” Teter wrote. “That’s likely a relatively inexpensive point of entry for the SMEs interested in Fusion Applications…especially for those interested in a co-existence strategy with existing applications.”

Oracle vs. Google: How long is 22 million pages?

The trial over Oracle’s claims that Google infringed on Oracle’s Java patents with its Android mobile phone devices has been delayed. Thanks in part to 22 million pages.

According to Groklaw, there is an independent damages expert named James Kearl appointed by the court. Kearl’s job is to, as Groklaw put it, “sift through and assess the damages reports of the parties and present and independent report that should help the court (and jury) understand and apply the better arguments of each when ultimately determining damages (assuming infringement has been found).”

Here’s the thing, though. Those damages reports that Kearl has to sift through amount to 22 million pages. Yes, 22 million! Do you know how long that is?

Let’s put it this way: If Kearl read one page per minute around the clock, it would take him about 40 years to get through 22 million pages. Put another way, to meet the January deadline, Kearl and 239 other people will have to read one page per minute around the clock - and that doesn’t even include any analysis of the data. How are they going to get it done? I honestly have no idea.

So yeah, maybe the delay was warranted.

Oracle issues two security patches totaling 77 fixes

Oracle issued its quarterly security patch yesterday afternoon. There are 77 total security patches, with the most vulnerable being for Java Runtime Environments (JREs).

The Java Critical Patch Update includes 20 fixes, 19 of which could be “remotely exploitable without authentication,” meaning they could be exploited over a network without a username and password. Six of them have the highest risk rating possible. Oracle suggests fixing all the vulnerabilities as soon as possible.

Over on the database and applications side, the Oracle Critical Patch Update includes 57 fixes on products such as Oracle Database (11g and 10g), Fusion Middleware, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel, Sun products and more. Twenty-two of them are remotely exploitable. The most vulnerable issues to patch are in the Solaris operating system. Again, Oracle suggests applying the patch as soon as possible.

The next critical patch update is expected Jan. 17, followed by April 17, July 17 and Oct. 16 of 2012.