Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Larry Ellison’

Is Oracle Really Killing the Sun Open Cloud?

Larry Ellison may be remembered as the one who steered clear of the “folly” that is cloud computing. Or he may be remembered for ignoring the real and considerable impacts that the cloud brings.

Or he may also be remembered for staying true to what Oracle does best. And that’s providing the underlying infrastructure for any platform, be it in the cloud or on-premise.

Or it may be that Ellison is simply bluffing. Oracle is really not killing the Sun Open Cloud. In its marathon event last week to discuss its plans for Sun, Ellison apparently hooted and howled about the cloud. He asked if anyone could explain it to him at all. He heard little if no response. He said Oracle is discontinuing the Sun Open Cloud, that they don’t want to be like Amazon Web Services, that they are not a public cloud service, and that Oracle is not in the business of renting by the minute.

Sponsor

We’re not so sure.

Look closer and it’s clear Oracle has many of the pieces for a cloud strategy. The SmoothSpan blog has a good vision for how an Oracle cloud strategy might unfold.

For example, the post points out how systems integrators are clamoring for a SasS environment from Oracle.

“….In that world, the System Integrators are the gatekeepers for the market. They’re very powerful, and the interesting discovery Tony [Hemelka, Helpstream's CEO] made is that they absolutely love Force.com. It’s not hard to see why. The SaaS model squeezes the SI ecosystem. The normal meat and potatoes business around just getting on-premises software installed is greatly reduced. The business of just keeping the lights on is almost non-existant for SaaS. Yet SI’s have a lot to bring to the table. A good SI often understands the Domain, its Best Practices, and the key Business Processes better even than the software vendor. Having access to a SaaS platform makes it possible for the SI to turn that valuable knowledge into product which can then be sold. That’s why having a platform on which to do that is so important to them.”

A Theory About the Open Web

But even if Oracle does have all the pieces, is its culture right for developing a cloud-based approach to the enterprise?

Earlier this week, we touched on the relationship between the social Web and cloud computing. Oracle is not considered a superstar of the social Web. Sure, the company uses the social Web, but it is not experimenting to the degree that you see with a company like IBM, perhaps Oracle’s biggest competitor.

IBM is developing a cloud-based collaboration platform. It is developing its own cloud computing service. It is diving deep into the world of the cloud and how the open Web fits with enterprise collaboration environments. In our view, these go hand in hand. It makes a lot of sense that if you want to be a cloud services provider, you need to understand the different ways Web oriented architectures function within the enterprise. A Web oriented architecture requires an online network. With that understanding comes the knowledge how to serve clients that depend on cloud-based infrastructures for their IT services.

Oracle does not want to be like Amazon, providing a public cloud infrastructure.

Instead, the Sun Open Cloud infrastructure will be configured for providers that want to provide their own public clouds and enterprises that seek to create private clouds.

You see? Oracle provides infrastructure – a complete IT services platform. Right now, all Oracle cares about is being the underpinning for all the systems in the enterprise IT environment.

As Dana Gardner points out:

“In doing complete IT package gig, Oracle has signaled the end of the best-of-breed, heterogeneous, and perhaps open source components era of IT. In the new IT era, services are king. The way you actually serve or acquire them is far less of a concern. Enterprises focus on the business and the IT comes, well, like electricity.

This is why “cloud” makes no sense to Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison. He’d rather we take out the word “cloud” from cloud computing and replace it with “Oracle.” Now that makes sense!”

It sure does. Oracle sees the cloud through the vision of its own technology infrastructure. The Sun cloud fits into that vision even if for now it is getting mothballed.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

A Map To Better Understand The Cloud Ecosystem…And The Hype

Trying to understand the basics of cloud computing is one matter but getting a grasp on the technologies across the different platforms is another issue entirely.

To try and simplify things just a bit, Appirio is offering a map that shows the cloud ecosystem. The map breaks out 70 different layers of technology across applications, platforms and infrastructure. The map is pretty sophisticated with the ability to drill down to undertand the underlying technologies.

Sponsor

Appirio is in the business of helping companies get into the cloud computing world so it is no surprise that the map has its own viewpoints on matters of the cloud.

From the Appirio blog:

“It (the map) distinguishes between offerings that are true cloud offerings vs. those that are “hosted” (single tenant / multi-instance) vs. those that are on-premise “private cloud”….not really a cloud at all.

Not really a cloud at all? Hmmm. There may be some who disagree with this view on cloud computing. Here’s the take from Gartner’s Tom Bittman:

That aside, the map will be pretty helpful to almost everyone with an interest in the cloud computing world. Here are a few of Appirio’s conclusions:

You Want Hype, We Have Hype: Man, It’s almost reminiscent of the podcasting hype a few years ago. Look at the map and you see that almost every tech company you can find has some take on the cloud. Cloud computing is at the top of Gartner’s Hype Cycle. And, of course, we have Larry Ellison, who is having a blast poking fun at the world of cloud computing. Hmm….when the clouds clear, what companies in the ecosystem will turn to vapor?

The More You Share, The Better You Will Be: The name of the game is multi-tenancy. “This results in more than just economies of scale: multi-tenancy enables agility and innovation since there’s only one code base to work off of, and customer behavior can be observed realtime.”

It’s Really Not That Clear At All: The lines are blurring out there. It’s difficult to tell what’s a cloud service and what is not. IBM, for instance, looks like it cuts across the spectrum. Where does it fit?

Kudos to Appirio. This is the kind of clarification that we need to get a better grasp on cloud computing and what it all means.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

Cloud Computing In Plain English

Almost three years ago, Lee and Sachi LeFever created their first video to explain RSS.

They called the video RSS in Plain English. They used paper cut outs to explain the XML format. It became an instant hit. Tens of thousands of people watched it. Today their company, Common Craft, make all sorts of custom videos. They’ve built a business around explaining concepts.

Their latest video explains cloud computing.

Sponsor

“Cloud Computing in Plain English,”ells the story of a florist whose business grows. She learns about cloud computing and realizes that perhaps maybe she should not have to worry about fixing broken servers.

video

Cloud computing is one of those topics that confuses and confounds people. Larry Ellison loves to poke at it. It’s the hot topic so it is refreshing to see Lee once again explain the topic in simple terms that pretty much anyone can understand. It makes everyone’s job a bit simpler.

Which takes us to the last point of the day. We get so many pitches from companies. The services are explained in terms that often need deciphering. What if more companies in the enterprise space spent more time explaining what they do? What if companies did something like what Common Craft did for Twitter or with Google to help explain Google Docs?

We covered indicee yesterday. Why? We think their product looks pretty valuable. But you know what set them apart? They made a great video. It was compelling to watch. It made us laugh. We started to think about what they do. Pretty soon we were writing about them!

Here’s a challenge. Make a video about what your enterprise software does. Show us a page with all sorts of ways we can learn what you are all about. If it really does explain what you do then that will deserve some mention here. Just leave a comment pointing to where we can see what you’ve done and we’ll get back to you. Promise.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

Roundup: DOJ approves Oracle-Sun deal, Gamestop falls short, Twitter’s charming memory loss

The Department of Justice cleared Oracle’s purchase of Sun — Larry Ellison’s $7.4 billion acquisition of the Valley’s rockstar server maker and owner of the rights to Java software, is a transaction on the scale of Yahoo’s ad sales deal with Microsoft. European antitrust regulators are still evaluating whether or not to launch an investigation. The Wall Street Journal reports that an issue about the way Sun licenses rights to Java had held up approval. What’s in it for you? Oracle will be able to sell integrated systems that bundle its database software with Sun’s hardware and widely-used Java software.

GameStop profits miss the mark – The world’s largest videogame retailer reported second quarter net income of $38.7 million, down from $57.2 million last year. The Grapevine, Texas-based firm’s CEO claimed on a conference call that a lack of compelling new releases was part of the problem. Bloomberg has the long version.

Lehman Brothers, the movie — The BBC is producing a TV movie about the collapse of the financial services firm scheduled for the anniversary of last year’s September 15th bankruptcy filing, the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. The Brits see the story differently, since Barclays picked up the firm’s North American investment banking and trading divisions. The New York Times reports on who’ll play who.

Xbox 360 failure rate is above 50 percent, survey says — The Red Ring of Death is all too familiar to owners of Microsoft’s game console. In a survey of 5,000+ owners, 52.4% reported having experienced either the Red Ring of Death, the E74 error, or another hardware failure. Sony’s Yellow Light of Death only hits 10.3% of owners. Nintendo owners lack a clever name for when their stuff breaks.

Twitter founder apparently forgot that they tried to trademark “tweet” once already — Why do we love Twitter? Partly because the management team behind the inexplicably super-popular messaging service exudes the messy-haired charm of a couple of college kids who haven’t slept because, you know, they got sucked into working on this Twitter thing. In today’s episode, computer scientist Sam Johnston points out that Twitter founder Biz Stone claimed the company has applied to trademark the word “tweet” because “it is clearly attached to Twitter from a brand perspective.” Johnston links to US Patent and Trademark Office records that show the Twitter team already applied to trademark the word in April. Their application, being for the word “tweet,” was turned down the same day.

Read the whole story…