Join Greentec Systems as Oracle Open World gets on its way
September 2013
Greentec Systems gets ready to attend Oracles big event this week from 9/22 – 9/26. As Oracle Open World 2013 gets under way, we imagine the assembled crowd will be looking forward to hearing CEO Larry Ellison say something about the Americas Cup, even if it’s only something like ‘We’re in it to win it.’ On to more substantive things. What can the projected 55,000 attendees look forward to this year?
The big talking point will likely be Oracle’s positioning of its in-memory technology. In the earnings release, Ellison said:
“Our customers don’t have to make any changes to their applications whatsoever; they simply flip on the in-memory switch, and the Oracle database immediately starts scanning data at a rate of billions or tens of billions of rows per second.”
A week ago during the company’s Q1 earnings call, Mark Hurd, president Oracle added: “We’ll be introducing Oracle version 12c in-memory database. We’ll be talking about it being able to deliver 100x faster application performance using our new architectural approach. We’ll talking about — we’ll be talking about existing Oracle apps that can now run in the Oracle Database functionality without change when using this in-memory capability.”
The message is clear: customers running SAP don’t have to move off Oracle DB and onto HANA in order to get equivalent performance. The subtext is that a migration is un-necessary and so cost free. That’s not entirely true because customers will still have to licence the in-memory capabilities. If they plan to run analytics as well then I can imagine Oracle sales people steering customers towards Exalytics and Exadata. Whichever way Oracle positions, it opens a door for negotiation.
Hurd also said somewhat vaguely: ” …We’ll have some releases in cloud. We’ll talk about we’ll have some releases in HCM and talent management, we’ll talk about database as a service, Java as a service that will be available to our customers. So there’ll be a whole slew of product announcements there that Larry will be talking about Sunday night and will continue on through the week.”
On the cloud front, we can expect Oracle to re-emphasize its ‘choice’ message where customers can decide whether to keep their applications running on premise or migrate to public or private clouds. That sounds like having the best of all worlds rather than the binary cloud/no cloud message so often heard elsewhere. It certainly provides a calming influence in a world concerned with NSA activity. Also look to hear from Microsoft, showcasing Azure and building upon past announcements.
Elsewhere, Oracle needs to show customers that the company is innovating enough to make continued investments worthwhile. That will not be easy for a crowd that, over the last few years, has seen Oracle do little more than acquire and then squeeze margins. It is all the more difficult for a company that has chosen to emphasize earnings first. But it’s not impossible.
