Oracle OpenWorld 2009: A sign of things to come
01/12/2009
San Francisco’s hotels, restaurants and streets were brimming with IT execs in October, as tens of thousands of people descended on the city for the much-hyped Oracle OpenWorld 2009 event. What has Oracle got that can pull such crowds – even in a business downturn?
Frontline CEO Steve Murphy and Harbour MSP CEO John Howl were there to find out, and to pass any news back to Frontline’s local customers.
“The sheer size of the Oracle market – evident in the turn-out to OpenWorld – is quite remarkable,” said Murphy. “With 1,900 presentations across the event, there is something for everyone – and we couldn’t possibly have covered it all.”
Major sponsor HP was well represented by Ann Livermore, Executive VP at HP, who made it very clear why almost half of Oracle customers run software on HP servers.
“HP continues to develop and market world class server and storage solutions, partnering successfully with Oracle and its software solutions. It’s a massive relationship that’s not going away, no matter what happens with Sun,” said Murphy.
He’s referring, of course, to the Sun Microsystems takeover, which was by far the biggest story of OpenWorld.
Since Oracle announced it was successful in acquiring Sun in April 2009, the industry has been buzzing with rumours about what will happen to the range of Sun products and services. Given that the European Union is yet to ratify the merger, it largely remains a matter of ‘watch this space’.
Despite this, Larry Ellison was quick to dispel the myths circulating about the takeover, promising that he’s in with Sun for the long haul.
“Ellison’s commitment to building the Sun server/storage range was clearly evident, and I came away from the conference extremely confident that Oracle will support the future development of Sun products,” said Murphy.
The launch of Exadata V2, a re-badged Sun 7210 server packaged with Oracle software, was a prime example of the sort of collaboration customers can expect in the future.
Indeed, Ellison’s confidence around such collaboration was on display with his announcement of the $10 million Exadata V2 challenge, which states: “If your Oracle database application doesn’t run at least twice as fast on Sun hardware as on IBM’s fastest computer, your company could win $10 million from Oracle.”
The bad news for local customers is that the challenge is only open to US Fortune 1000 companies. But the good news is that it demonstrates that Oracle and Sun are clearly in it to win it, and that the healthy competition between the three main plays in the hardware market – HP, IBM and Sun – will remain strong.
“Co-operation and competition sit side by side in a mature IT world and the customer is the beneficiary, as they will have the choice of these three vendors,” said Murphy.
Frontline supports Oracle’s on-demand vision
The Harbour MSP data centre is the Australian backbone for deployment of enterprise-level on-demand solutions from Oracle. Harbour MSP provides the managed infrastructure services that keep Oracle solutions up and running.
Given Harbour MSP’s close relationship with Oracle and it on-demand offering, John Howl attended many of the presentations around on-demand software services at the conference. For Howl, the main take-away was the technical advancements achieved with the launch of Exadata V2.
“While it hasn’t been fully signed off for on-demand deployment yet, the pre-configured nature of something like Exadata V2 is exciting. It will deliver better bang for the customer’s buck, offering faster speeds at a more moderate price – which is something mid-enterprise customers will welcome, especially in a fully hosted and fully managed environment such as Harbour MSP,” he said.
Frontline and Harbour MSP will offer full support for launches like Exadata V2. “We will architect the solution, provide professional services, systems integration, configuration, quoting on hardware and software – whatever it takes to get the right solution up and running at customers’ premises or at our data centre,” he said.
“We are very much a part of Oracle’s on-demand software stack in Australia, and to hear about their visions for this side of software was both encouraging and exciting. And, of course, given our experience in working with Sun hardware, any future collaboration on that platform will only be a bonus for our customers.”
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