Posted on November 6, 2015 by Greg Mika
Tags: Oracle OpenWorld, #OOW15, Data Security, Cloud, Cloud Computing, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, Oracle Database, 12c, Enterprise Manager
As another Oracle OpenWorld comes to a close it is time to reflect on last week’s grand event. We were honored to be recognized by Oracle with our 3rd consecutive Oracle Partner of the Year for outstanding customer service and sales excellence. Every year seems to deliver more sessions and larger demo grounds then the year before and this year was no exception, but the real takeaway for me has always been the vision of the future from the leaders of a company that has spent 15+ years at the top of the IT food chain communicated through the keynotes. It is not always just about the things that they say, but also about how they say it, what they infer, and what they don’t say.
To me, the four most telling keynotes that are worth your time to review:
Larry Ellison Talks About The Secure Cloud #OOW15 (VIDEO) - 10/27/2015 & [Highlights Below]
Mark Hurd Vision #OOW15 (VIDEO) - 10/26/2015 & [Highlights Below]
Thomas Kurian on Cloud #OOW15 (VIDEO) - 10/28/2015 & [Highlights Below]
There is New IaaS
There is New PaaS
There is New SaaS
Andy Mendelsohn Talks Database 12cR2 and Beyond #OOW15 (VIDEO) & [Highlights Below]
Final Thoughts and Opinions
Larry mentioned that Oracle never competes with SAP in the cloud and rarely competes with IBM for Middleware and that in the Cloud, Oracle’s competitors are clearly Amazon and Microsoft.
IT Supremacy has always about controlling the platform. In Client/Server days the “platform” was the desktop. During the Dot Com Boom the middleware/application became the platform. But in the Cloud Oracle seems to be saying it’s the Infrastructure. So while Salesforce is doing well in the cloud, they are using the application as the platform, and because Microsoft and Amazon are going one level lower to the Infrastructure, just like Oracle, they are the nearest competitors. So while Oracle is working hard at all three levels of the Cloud, IaaS seems to be the largest focus (Note the order that Kurian talked about new Cloud: 1st IaaS, then PaaS, then SaaS).
So how does Oracle plan to win the IaaS war over Microsoft and Amazon? The first answer seems to be that Security in the Silicon (and security in the platform) will give Oracle’s Infrastructure a key advantage. The second answer seems to be to use the fact that people rarely change quickly as an advantage, by using technologies such as Multi-Tenant to allow customers to move to the cloud over time and make it easier for them to move from Oracle to Oracle. Third is by embracing Open Source integration (including Mendelsohn’s 12cR2 presentation), something Oracle and Microsoft have traditionally avoided but now Oracle seems to feel could be a competitive advantage over Microsoft.
What was not clear is how Oracle will match the strength of Microsoft and Amazon’s data center footprint. Companies are generally secretive about where their data centers are, but both Amazon and Microsoft’s are so big that they are hard to hide. Whether Oracle can say the same or not is unknown, who knows, perhaps Oracle will someday look to acquire a 3rd party Data Center Company.
Will Oracle vision be realized or not remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t bet against them, and I look forward to the journey.
-Greg Mika, Director Sales Engineering & Sales Operations, Mythics, Inc.
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