Photo credit: Jim Bahn
This year’s Oracle Open World was not the best of times; nor was it the worst of times. One of the world’s largest tech events was most notable for not being notable. No significant innovations or changes in direction were announced, Oracle executives stayed on message, competitors were not put down and longtime rival Microsoft gave the best keynote address of the event. In sporting terms it was a building year for Oracle. The big news turned out to be what was not being said.
Although a lot of lip service was paid to innovation, most of the true innovation was happening on the waves. The new products announced - Oracle Database In-Memory Option, the SPARC M6-32 server, and the SuperCluster M6-32 – do the same thing as older products only faster, better, cheaper. There was so much talk of appliances, it sometimes seemed like we were attending Williams Sonoma World. The other major product announcements: Compute Cloud, Object Storage Cloud, Database Cloud, Java Cloud, Business Intelligence Cloud, Documents Cloud, Mobile Cloud, Database Backup Cloud, Billing and Revenue Management Cloud, and Cloud Marketplace seemed to all have something to do with the cloud. In my estimation the connection between the two was not made very clear to the 60,000 attendees and perhaps for good reason.
Although the 34th America’s Cup Race was supposed to be the backdrop for Oracle Open World, the lack of major announcements and the keynotes speeches made Open World the backdrop for the race. Almost single handedly Larry Ellison has changed the elite, clubby, offshore yacht event into an extreme, mass media, in-your-face sport. Following rules which allow the winner of the last race to draw up the specifications for the boats in the current race, Team Oracle choose the superfast, super dangerous , super expensive, AC72, a wing-sailed catamaran for the competition – the world’s fastest sail boat.
The record time for an AC72 during the race was 55 mph (88 km/h, 47.57 knots); fast enough to get you a traffic ticket on most San Francisco streets. Sailors had to wear helmets, flak jackets, and underwater breathing devices while on board. Even so Artemis Racing crewmember Andrew “Bart” Simpson was killed during a training sail in May and the threat of a tragic mistake hung over every boat. With the cost of racing in AC72’s approaching $100 million, Club Nautico di Roma, the challenger of record, had to withdraw for financial reasons and only three teams could raise enough bank to race. Given the high level of sponsorship the race could no longer be held far off shore had been but in the busy cross roads of the San Francisco Bay.
Team Oracle started the best of 9 series with a two race deficit for trying to win a qualifying race the old fashion way - by cheating. Technology triumphed in the end. Using Oracle Big Data products to analyze the early races, Team Oracle modified its AC72 to make it the faster boat. In a made for television ending, Team Oracle came from behind to take the race from Team Emirates New Zealand (both entities long time Oracle customers). Following Roman fashion the keynote was interrupted to parade the Auld Mug, the oldest trophy in sports, around the Moscone Center in triumph.
At various points during the week the race had been so close that by my count Larry Ellison did not show up for at least three speeches he was scheduled to give including a keynote address to the 60,000 attendees. Given the boring nature of the announcements can you really blame him? Still there is some irony in a company saying you need to delight customers having a CEO who does not show up for meetings. Open World attendees repaid the snub by walking out in mass from pinch hitter Thomas Kurian’s speech but at the end of the day they will still buy the products. Given that Larry was the highest paid CEO in America last year his poor work attendance is likely to become an issue at this October’s shareholder’s meeting as the Wall Street Journal reports.
For this observer the best Oracle keynote was made by Edward Screven, the company’s chief corporate architect and Henrik Stahl, the vice president of Java Product Management. They presented a vision of the internet of things a world driven by smart, ubiquitous, connected devices: M2M—machine to machine and reported the number of developers working in Java is the same as the number of people in Sweden. The claim was also made that soon the number of devices will approach 8 billion. So during this speech received the unfortunate news that my toaster will soon be competing with my teenage daughter for internet access. Throw in my car, my refrigerator, and my washing machine and streaming old episodes of the original Star Trek or Emergency from Netflix will become even more painful than watching them.
The first Microsoft executive ever to address an Open World audience ever, Brad Anderson made the best keynote speeches of the entire event. Crisp, polished, practiced Anderson explained why Microsoft Azure was the best Cloud to run Oracle products. He was quickly followed by an Oracle speaker who explained why Azure was not the best cloud to run Oracle.
Unfortunately for Brad, at the end of the day, the Oracle spokesman will be proven right. The big news at Oracle Open World was what was unsaid. Oracle is crushing the stack and technology convergence is taking place in the cloud as well as in the hand held market. What this means is that Oracle is developing hardware optimize to run its software – a point made repeatedly during the event. Left unsaid at Oracle Open World 2013 was that someday Oracle hardware products and cloud products will converge giving it a cost advantage over all of its competitors running Oracle products including internal IT departments. In the long run Oracle Corporation, just like Team Oracle, has developed a strategy that cannot lose.
