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Oracle Unveils a Niche Cloud Product at OpenWorld
An overview of speakers and strategy.
San Francisco, Calif. -- Oracle OpenWorld is different than many shows in that it's more businesslike: there's more of a focus on Oracle's current products and future plans. My last day of the event started off with a keynote session from a trio of Oracle executives: Juan Loaiza, Senior Vice President, Dave Donatelli, Executive Vice President of Converged systems, and John Fowler, Executive Vice President.
Donatelli did a good job, and I think he may have been tied with Diane Bryant as the best solo keynote presentation of the week. He had an easy-to-follow and well-paced style, and I was glad to have seen a presentation on Oracle hardware and Converged Infrastructure (CI), something that I hadn't yet had time to investigate on my own.
A Complete Solution
Oracle has, I believe (now that IBM has sold its chip manufacturing facilities), the only completely integrated datacenter solution from chip (SPARC) to cloud (OPC) to OSes (Oracle Linux and Solaris) to programing languages (JAVA).
John Fowler and Juan Loaiza were my favorite joint speakers. They played off each other well as they gave their presentation on Oracle's strategy and vision for infrastructure development. They further defined what the Cloud@Customer is, which is a product line that greatly intrigues me. They also discussed the advantages of Oracle's "Engineered Together" systems.
A Full Cloud On-Premises
Back to Cloud@Customer. Oracle claims it's the same hardware and software stack that Oracle runs in its public cloud, but co-located at a customer's site and priced as a subscription. Oracle takes care of the administration side of the unit, but the data resides locally, which can be a huge factor for corporate and political governance. Yes, this will be a niche product, but it will certainly be a differentiator for Oracle to have in its lineup.
I got a chance to sit in on an interesting session about how Intel Security is creating large-scale demo environments using Ravello. Ravello is an interesting product that may cause VMware some pain in the future.
Overall, I'm glad to have attended OpenWorld. There were some excellent keynote speakers and some session speakers that were just plain bad. I was able to learn a lot about Oracle's virtualization plans and products, met some great people and had an enjoyable time. Over the next few days, I'm going to digest the event and give a wrap-up write up on Oracle and Virtualization, so be sure to keep your eyes peeled for that in the very near future.
About the Author
Tom Fenton has a wealth of hands-on IT experience gained over the past 30 years in a variety of technologies, with the past 20 years focusing on virtualization and storage. He previously worked as a Technical Marketing Manager for ControlUp. He also previously worked at VMware in Staff and Senior level positions. He has also worked as a Senior Validation Engineer with The Taneja Group, where he headed the Validation Service Lab and was instrumental in starting up its vSphere Virtual Volumes practice. He's on X @vDoppler.