Oracle OpenWorld 2015 Wrap-Up (Video Highlights & Perspective)

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] 

• We are not winning a lot of these cyber-battles. We are losing a lot of these battles (ie. OPM, Heartbleed, Venom)
• Oracle wants to remove the “off” switch from security, building it into computing by default at an ever-lower level
• It’s better to have security at the level of the processor than the operating system because silicon is more tamper-proof
• SPARC M7 is distinguished by a technology called “Silicon Secured Memory”
• Silicon Secured Memory would have stopped Heartbleed and Venom immediately
• Security no longer has a performance hit…so why would you ever not use it
• One of the advantages of Oracle’s cloud services is that security will always be enabled by default

Mark Hurd Vision #OOW15 (VIDEO) - 10/26/2015 & [Highlights Below]

• Eighty percent of all production apps will be in the cloud. “Today it’s about 25 percent”
• Two software-as-a-service (SaaS) suite providers will have 80 percent of the cloud enterprise application market
• One hundred percent of software development/testing efforts will be conducted in the cloud
• All enterprise data will be stored virtually in the cloud. “More data is in the cloud now than in traditional storage systems”
• The enterprise cloud will be the most secure IT environment. “We are fully patched, fully secured, fully encrypted—that’s our cloud”
• Companies are stuck with an aged and brittle legacy IT environment.  The cloud will be the only way for companies to leapfrog from where they are today to the speed, innovation, and cost control they desperately need.

Thomas Kurian on Cloud #OOW15 (VIDEO) - 10/28/2015 & [Highlights Below]

There is New IaaS

• Archive Storage Service provides long-term, fully mirrored data retention at only “a dollar a terabyte a month”
• Elastic Compute, “the ability to say, I want a certain number of cores and I want to pay for them by the hour”
• Oracle Exadata Database Machine, as a cloud service

There is New PaaS

• Oracle Big Data Cloud Service
• Oracle Social Network Cloud Service allows enterprise users to “collaborate across the company using a Facebook-like interface.”
• Oracle Internet of Things Cloud Service collects and filters data from a myriad of sensors and devices.

There is New SaaS

• Oracle added an impressive 183 new modules across its entire comprehensive list of enterprise SaaS applications

Andy Mendelsohn Talks Database 12cR2 and Beyond #OOW15 (VIDEO) & [Highlights Below]

• Oracle customers have a distinct advantage when it comes to working across on-premises and cloud-based databases.  “Other clouds, like Amazon, have no story on premises”
•  “You are not going to move everything up to the cloud next week or even next year, this transition will happen over the next 10 or 20 years
• Oracle Enterprise Manager12c will allow customers to manage all their databases—on premises and in the cloud—using a single screen
•  We’re convinced that over the next few years, security is going to be the main reason people move to public cloud, because vendors like Oracle can provide vastly better security than most customers can on premises”
• Oracle Multitenant, will help customers drive down the cost of managing databases and allow  online movement of pluggable databases between servers, data centers and the Oracle Cloud
• Oracle Database 12c Release 2 includes many features to simplify the journey to the cloud, including many enhancements for Developers (including Open Source Drivers)

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.