By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
March 8, 2010

The second iteration of Oracle’s Exadata database engine will feature flash storage embedded within the server machine, eliminating the need to source data from storage disks and cutting query processing time significantly, a company executive revealed Friday.

The integration of Flash storage into the processing central of the stack makes it an ideal machine for OLTP (On-Line Transaction Processing) applications that only read small amounts of data but does it repetitively.

“Coupled with the hybrid columnar compression feature which groups data by column before compression, the flash storage can fit up to 50 terabytes of data,” explained Christopher Chelliah, general manager for Exadata and Appliance solutions, Oracle Asia Pacific.

Launched in September 2009, Exadata’s Version 2, according to Chelliah, hopes to address the growing volume of corporate data, which triples every two years. “As data grows, queries tend to go slower,” he said, adding that the transfer of huge volumes of data through the pipelines create a bottleneck that degrade the performance of the machines in the long run.

Aside from Flash memory integration, Chelliah said Oracle is approaching this problem in a two-fold manner: by integrating a Smart Scan feature in the storage drives, and by using transfer pipes with higher throughputs.

Smart Scan, Chelliah explained, turns disk drives into intelligent storage by fitting in a query processing feature. Using the analogy of a needle in the haystack, Chelliah said Smart Scan “looks for the needle” among all the disk arrays before sending it back, instead of transferring all the data up through the pipeline.

In solving the problem of bottlenecks, the Oracle executive said the new stack is using InfiniBand, a PCI card-based specialized cable which speeds up transfer rates up to ten times.

“The key value proposition of Exadata V2 is being able to process data quickly,” Chelliah remarked. “It eliminates the need to buy more storage to store more data, which can help companies save on costs.”

The second release of Oracle’s Exadata is using a Sun Microsystems server machine, different from its predecessor which uses an HP server. Asked whether this will be the natural direction of future Oracle database releases following its recent acquisition of Sun, Chelliah remarked: “I have no comment on future directions of Oracle, but what I know is that future database releases are still going to use x86 and 64-bit versions.”

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By Sharon Gaudin
Computerworld (US)
March 4, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - The already heated online search war cranked up a notch in recent days as Google officials openly blamed Microsoft for triggering the European Commission’s antitrust probe into its activities.

Analysts say that if true, Microsoft’s decision to seek an EC antitrust investigation into Google activities would mark the latest move in its continuing effort to knock the high-riding search vendor down a peg or two.

The EC announced late last month that it had launched an antitrust investigation of Google based on complaints from three firms, two with connections to Microsoft.

Over the past year or so, Microsoft has been spending a lot of money and development resources to capture some of Google’s 60% share of the search market. But while the release of Microsoft’s Bing search engine last summer did garner a lot of attention, Google still maintains the dominant position it has held in the search market for years.

Now Microsoft appears to be taking a different route — creating a legal storm that would distract Google officials and keep them from focusing on the future of the business.

“Against Google’s level of control,” any effort to compete directly in the search business “could take [Microsoft] a lot of years and a massive investment,” said Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group. “This approach [using legal means to distract Google] potentially shortens their time and the investment.

“The disparity in market share is simply too large for them to close the gap unless Google makes a massive sustained mistake or is hit by a successful antitrust action,” he added.

Whit Andrews, an analyst at Gartner Inc., said it’s no surprise that the Microsoft-Google battle would enter a new realm, in this case the courtroom.

“I think that search is the most important crossroads in the history of information,” Andrews said. “I expect the striving conflict among the most powerful companies and countries in the world to intensify.”

In a conference call with journalists last week, Julia Holtz, Google’s top antitrust lawyer, blamed Microsoft for sparking the probe. “Microsoft is our competitor, and that explains many actions,” she said.

She noted that the three companies whose complaints triggered the investigation included Ciao, a German company acquired by Microsoft in 2008.

“Ciao [was] a long-time AdSense partner of Google’s, with whom we always had a good relationship,” Holtz said in a blog post. “However, after Microsoft acquired Ciao in 2008, we started receiving complaints about our standard terms and conditions. They initially took their case to the German competition authority, but it now has been transferred to Brussels.”

She also noted that a second complainent, Foundem, a U.K. price comparison site, is a member of of a trade group called iComp , which is largely funded by Microsoft.

French legal search engine ejustice.fr was the third company whose complaint against Google is under investigation by the EC.

Microsoft responded to Holtz’ charge by contending that Google responded to the EC investigation by pointing fingers rather than answering the charges.

Dave Heiner, vice president and deputy general counsel at Microsoft, added in a blog post that “Google hasn’t been shy about raising antitrust concerns about Microsoft in the last few years. Ultimately what’s important is not who is complaining, but whether or not the challenged practices are anticompetitive.”

Enderle noted that in the past, Microsoft frequently complained that rivals like Oracle Corp., Sun Microsoystems Inc. and Google were behind antitrust probes that targeted its actions.

Stuart Williams, an analyst with Technology Business Research, said users shouldn’t assume that Microsoft’s apparent legal challenge to Google indicates that it’s decided that Bing is not up to the challenge of taking on the search giant. It simply means that Microsoft is using all the tools in its arsenal.

“Both vendors have strong search technologies; the cases are not indications that either is throwing in the towel,” said Williams. “Large corporations can fight in the market as well as in the courtroom.”

The analysts do note that no matter who prompted the antitrust investigation, Google should prepare itself for the legal challenge.

“If you think about it, the validity of the charge should be based on the validity and substance of the evidence, not on whether a large competitor brought it to the enforcement agency’s attention,” said Enderle.

“I think this is a natural progression. Google’s should have been to anticipate that the fight they helped start with Microsoft would likely come back to haunt them. It’s like firing a nuclear bomb with the belief that the other side won’t turn around and use it against you.”

The antitrust action appears to be the latest battele in an escalating battle between Google and Microsoft on several fronts, from enterprise applications to operating systems and now especially to the burgeoning search market .

Nancy Gohring and Paul Meller of the IDG News Service, contributed to this article.

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld . Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin , send e-mail to sgaudin@computerworld.com or subscribe to Sharon’s RSS feed .

Read more about government in Computerworld’s Government Knowledge Center.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
February 17, 2010

Acknowledging the ongoing hype and evolution revolving around cloud computing technology, enterprise software provider Oracle on Thursday unraveled their own cloud strategy that pushes for private cloud adoption by large companies.

“The hype around cloud computing is not dying down; in fact, it is steadily growing momentum, and continuously evolving over the years,” said Sushil Kumar, vice president for product strategy and business development, Oracle, sharing a Gartner study that shows cloud computing situated at the peak of inflated expectations.

While many firms are hesitant to jump onto the public cloud—a type of cloud platform available to the general public with pre-specified features and offsite data hosting—Kumar said many firms can deploy private clouds on top of their existing hardware, which is more customizable and secure.

“Oracle is offering a technology stack that they can deploy on top of existing systems,” he emphasized. Kumar said enterprise computing has gone from being very siloed, to grid systems, and now to private clouds bringing “utility computing” to its users.

Kumar, however, clarified that they are merely offering technology solutions to customers, and not complete deployable systems that include hardware and other components. That option, he said, is available through Oracle On-Demand, a selection of various offerings—from on-premise system implementations to multi-tenant SaaS deployments—that users can leverage to transition slowly into a full-blast private cloud.

The Oracle executive said they are ramping up their foray into the private cloud sphere in order to dispel security qualms about the cloud. “We provide companies with a private cloud platform so that they can take advantage of its benefits without too much risk,” he stressed. “With private clouds, there is more control over security and other necessary precautions.”

Oracle has also made available their software solutions through public cloud IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) providers, such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Hosting. “For public clouds, we have data encryption for databases and fine-grain access controls so data can be secure even off-site,” he added.

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In an exclusive briefing with the IT professionals from the food and beverage industry, Oracle (Philippines) Corporation shared how it enables consumer goods companies to successfully achieve profitable innovation and deliver high-demand products to the market with Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management for Process.

Agile PLM provides the foundation for a multi-stage collaborative project and portfolio management that streamlines and accelerates product development and introduction.

Agile PLM for Process provides an integrated solution that manages all aspects of innovation, such as product and portfolio management, specification management, supplier management, formulation and BOM management, packaging and labeling management, compliance and quality management, and data syndication. With integrated and collaborative framework, companies achieve faster product and packaging development cycles, higher sales and margins, lower costs, higher quality and more compliant products responding to consumer needs.

“With the rapidly changing regulatory and compliance challenges in the food and beverage industry, organizations need tools that can help them improve success rate of new products, reduce time-to-market, ensure compliance and drive productivity,” said Rathinakumar Vaidyanathan, Director, PLM Applications, Oracle Asia Pacific. “Oracle delivers all these benefits with its best-in-class and most complete PLM capabilities.”

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Veronica C. Silva
Computerworld Philippines
February 2, 2010

Oracle Corporation’s office in the Philippines on Thursday introduced to the local press its latest middleware, which was developed with the strength of its acquisition of Bea Systems in 2008.

Launched worldwide in July 2009 and regionally in October 2009, the Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g already counts top bank Metropolitan Bank and Trust Company (Metrobank) and the Bureau of Customs among its numerous clients in the country.

Chin Ying Loong, general manager for ASEAN, Oracle Fusion Middleware, said the launch of the new product in the local market is a commitment of the software giant to bring its latest innovation to its customers in the country.

“With Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, our customers will benefit from the increased performance and centralized management of a modern infrastructure, enabling them to drive down costs, improve efficiency and differentiate their organization from competitors,” said Ying Loong.

Oracle Fusion Middleware integrates disparate systems and applications of enterprises and even business partners. As an open and integrated middleware, the new product brings together the different functionalities of Oracle and Bea Systems.

Oracle acquired Bea Systems for US$8.5 billion particularly to enhance the Oracle Fusion Middleware. Oracle said customer feedback has prompted the acquisition as customers noted the efficiency in working with the middleware of the two companies.

Speaking on the acquisition back in 2008, Oracle President Charles Phillips said “it (the transaction) will accelerate the adoption of Java-based middleware technologies and SOA; advance innovation in enterprise applications infrastructure software; extend our strategic relationships with customers and partners; and increase our penetration in key regions like China.”

Ying Loong said the new product is designed to solve important business requirements of today’s enterprises, including rich Internet applications, business process management, enterprise team and social computing, application customization, identity and compliance management, and systems consolidation.

It was also designed to exploit current technology trends such as multi-core processing, 64-bit operating systems and large memory, virtualization and cloud computing, and storage.

“It optimizes technology trends to protect customer investments,” added Ying Loong.

He noted that industries such as telecoms, banking and manufacturing already have made investments in several IT systems and applications. The middleware can be used to integrate these different systems and applications, thus, customers’ previous IT investments need not go to waste.

Oracle Fusion Middleware has complete components, which can be bought separately but when integrated together, they can work together. Among its components are development tools, user interaction, enterprise performance management, business intelligence, content management, service-oriented architecture and process management, application grid, enterprise management, and identity management.

Customers with the version 10g can seamlessly upgrade to version 11g, said Ying Loong.

Oracle Fusion Middleware is designed to support large or small datacenters alike.

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By Patrick Thibodeau
Computerworld (US)
January 29, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - The thing that Oracle Corp. wanted to make clear Wednesday, its first full day as the owner of Sun Microsystems, is that it’s time to stop worrying about the future of Sun.

There was probably no other message that mattered more for Oracle about Sun, which has lingered in Never-Never land since this merger was announced last April. But big changes are ahead.

Sun’s old way of relying on partners and resellers to sell to its largest customers will instead change to direct support model, and more broadly, a build-to-order system backed by a new army of sales representatives that Oracle is hiring.

There will remain broad support for many of Sun’s core technologies, UltraSparc, Solaris, Java, and its middleware applications, something Oracle officials worked to make clear. But Sun’s product catalog will be substantially scaled back and much still needs be revealed here.

What will emerge from the combined companies will be highly integrated systems with Sun and Oracle technologies. The Oracle Exadata high-end data base and storage system developed jointly by these two companies is a preview of what’s ahead. In its new delivery system, built-in support technology will get a lot attention, with plans for “collectors,” systems that provide feedback on system configuration and help manage changes.

Oracle says it will boost its research and development spending from $2.8 billion to $4.3 billion.

One longtime Sun customer, Daniel Grim, CTO at the University of Delaware, said one message he heard is that Oracle wants a more intimate relationship with customers and “if they do that it will be good,” he said.

But Grim also wants to see some product commitments, including stronger support for Solaris on x86, which he said right now is all but unsupported.

“It gives me hope, but I’m not sure that I’ve heard enough yet that I’m reassured,” said Grim of the merged companies.

In a nutshell, this was Sun’s problem going into today. Sun’s market share in worldwide server factory revenue went in one year from 9.5% to 7.5%, according to IDC’s third quarter report, its most recent report. But now Sun’s server product line has Oracle selling and backing its systems and Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO, is promising a fast comeback for Sun.

Some of what Oracle said Wednesday about its plans was a little over the top. In talking about the centralization of support, Charles Phillips, Oracle’s president. “We want the best paid reps in the industry,” he said. “We want the Derek Jeter,” he said, referring to the Yankees baseball star.

“To the administration that wants a jobs program this is a company that is creating jobs, 2000 jobs today,” said Phillips, who did not mention the layoffs that have already happened at Sun, and others that may occur as the merger is implemented. Oracle has not said how many be jobs may be lost.

Analysts will be watching carefully to see how Oracle, fundamentally a software company, manages a hardware firm.

“A software company running a hardware company has, to my knowledge, never been done successfully, said Rob Enderle, an independent IT analyst. “If anyone can do it Oracle would be on my shortlist, but on a scale of one to 10 with 10 being most difficult, this is definately an 11.”

Oracle officials, in seems, are putting a lot emphasis on developing Sun’s core technologies, improving its UltraSparc chips, increasing their thread count and memory, and keeping Solaris as its enterprise operating system of choice.

The Sun’s Solaris strategy and its open sourcing of this operating system has helped to, perhaps, give confidence about its future. Hewlett-Packard has become a major seller of Solaris x86 systems, but it does not sell Solaris on its Itanium systems, which support Unix rival HP -UX. IBM has Power and AIX, but the Unix market for all these vendors - while still large - has been declining as x86 system chips increase in their capability.

But the immediate steps for Oracle, said Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT , is for Oracle “to keep the vast majority of Sun customers on board and basically let them know they haven’t been forgotten.”

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By Paul Krill
InfoWorld (US)
January 28, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Oracle CEO Larry Ellison expressed high hopes for his company’s now-completed acquisition of Sun Microsystems Wednesday but denied media reports that Oracle planned massive layoffs of Sun employees.

Expressing ambitions to be like IBM was in the 1960s, Ellison stressed that Oracle could offer customers a full line of integrated software and hardware technologies. He addressed attendees at a session detailing Sun-Oracle post-merger plans, held at Oracle headquarters in Redwood Shores, Calif.

[ Oracle continues to hail Java but is not interested in offering the proposed Sun Cloud service. | Relive the rise and fall of Sun Microsystems in InfoWorld's slideshow. ]

“It took a while, but Oracle and Sun are now one company,” Ellison said of the $7.4 billion merger, which closed on Tuesday. “We’re very excited. Sun has a wonderful heritage of engineering and innovation.”

“Our vision for the year 2010 is the same as IBM’s vision for the year 1960, which is go ahead and deliver a comprehensive suite of technologies,” said Ellison. IBM was successful with that strategy and became “the most important company in the history of the Earth,” he said.

“I believe that by having all the pieces, we can deliver better working systems,” Ellison said.

But he denied media reports that said Oracle would lay off half of Sun’s organization.

“I think the people who [reported] that should be ashamed of themselves,” said Ellison.

“The truth is, we’re actually hiring 2,000 people over the next few months to beef up the Sun businesses, and that’s about twice as many people as we’ll be laying off,” he said. Prior to the completion of the merger, however, Sun was already in lay-off mode. Most recently, the company in October revealed intentions to cut 3,000 jobs.

The Sun business will begin contributing to Oracle profits in February, said Ellison. Last year, Ellison had said Sun was losing $100 million per month while waiting for the merger to close. The deal had been held up by European Union objections, which have been resolved.

Oracle, Ellison said, plans to sell to and service the top 4,000 Sun customers directly.  Customers, however, still can buy Oracle software to run on non-Sun hardware, he noted.

“If you want to run our database on HP, we’ll sell you that,” said Ellison.

Ellison also stressed Oracle’s commitment to the Solaris Unix OS acquired with Sun and also to Linux.

“I love Linux. We’re a big supporter of Linux. Solaris is an older and more capable OS,” said Ellison.

Additionally, he stressed MySQL, the open source database that Sun owned, fits in with the company’s strategy of offering different databases for different uses.

This story, “Oracle’s Ellison excited about Sun technologies,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments on Oracle at InfoWorld.com.

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By Patrick Thibodeau
Computerworld (US)
January 26, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - James Gosling, the father of the Java programming language, posted the image of a tombstone on his blog last week, an R.I.P., for Sun Microsystems Co. Before long. more than 800 employees, outside developers and others had posted comments.

The responses, under the headline, “So long, old friend…,” were similarly eulogizing, many offering up a simple “thank you” mixed with some sadness, a few memories and sprinkles of hope for the post-merger.

On the same day Gosling posted his tombstone, CEO Jonathan Schwartz sent around an internal memo expressing his pride at having worked at Sun and urging employees “to emotionally resign from Sun,” and prepare to take “the first step in a new adventure.”

What wasn’t said in Schwartz’s note — and isn’t clear at this point — is how many at Sun will continue with the merged companies.

Schwartz and some of Sun’s other top executives will leave with large severances; in Schwartz’s case, that would be more than $12 million in severance, according to Sun’s recent proxy statement . The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that Schwartz will soon resign .

With European regulatory approvals for the deal all but final, Oracle and Sun plan to hold Webcast briefings on Wednesday to outline the direction of the combined companies and their many products.

Sun has about 29,000 employees and the combined headcount of the two firms will be about 115,000. Analysts, however, expect cutbacks to take place once the merger begins in earnest.

Oracle and Sun announced their plans to merge in April but the uncertainty about Sun’s future goes back a little further, to March, when news surfaced that Sun was in acquisition talks with IBM.

Oracle wanted the merger completed sometime in last fall, but European regulators’ delay in approving the merger has dragged it out. That, in turn, may have hurt Sun’s share of the server market. Its worldwide server systems revenue totalled $778 million for the third quarter of last year, a 35% decline from the same quarter in 2008, according to IDC’s latest report on worldwide systems factory revenue. All vendors saw revenues fall in the recession, but Sun’s decline was the steepest.

Even so, Jean Bozman, an IDC analyst, points out that Sun remains the fourth largest server vendor in the world, after IBM, which had 30% of the world’s market share with $3.3 billion in revenue in the last quarter; Hewlett-Packard, with a 31% share and $3.2 billion in revenue; Dell , with 13.5% and $1.4 billion; and Sun, with a 9.5% market share.

Sun’s “installed base is so large there is continuing demand to replace what people have,” said Bozman.

For the first time since the merger acquisition talks began, the big new thing for Sun and Oracle will be the gradual removal of the uncertainty about the future — starting with Wednesday’s briefing.

The tech industry has, of course, seen many companies with great legacies evaporate. In this case, some of what was Sun may survive, thanks to decisions to open source much of what it owns, according to one person who posted on Gosling’s blog. Henry Story, a Web architect at Sun, wrote: Sun Microsystems was indeed one of the greatest companies ever.

“Jonathan [Schwartz]will be remembered for open sourcing the whole software/hardware stack, so that at least none of the engineers who worked at the company will have wasted their time,” Story wrote. “In other companies, such a takeover could all so easily [have] sent their work to the dustbin of copyrighted material. Imagine a great musician — a Mozart perhaps — working for some owner who then one day turned around and just burnt all his work. This is not what happened. And yet, all too often, this is indeed what does happen in the software industry.”

For his part, Gosling appears ready to move on with Oracle. He followed his tombstone post with one of fish tank that shows the Java mascot with a snorkel. Sun plus Oracle = Snorcle?

“Enough of being maudlin, it’s time to look forward to being a unified company,” wrote Gosling.

Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld . Follow Patrick on Twitter at @DCgov , send e-mail to pthibodeau@computerworld.com or subscribe to Patrick’s RSS feed

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By Eric Lai
Computerworld (US)
January 21, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - A European IT consulting firm is warning large enterprises and government entities not to deploy OpenOffice.org until Oracle Corp. shows proof that it will invest as heavily in the development of open-source productivity suite as project champion Sun Microsystems Inc. did.

According to a 12-page report published earlier this week by Amsterdam-based Software Improvement Group, the main risk is that OpenOffice.org’s code may get buggier if Oracle, after it finalizes its acquisition of Sun , pulls personnel and resources from OpenOffice.org.

Though spun out to the open-source community in 2000 by Sun, OpenOffice.org’s development and marketing still relies heavily on paid Sun employees, such as OpenOffice.org community manager (and overall boss), Louis Saurez-Potts.

“There is a fairly advanced QA mechanism in the OpenOffice.org project,” said Tobias Kuipers, CTO of the 50-person consulting firm, in an interview. “It involves 30-40 man-years [of developer time], which is fairly expensive and not something you can maintain in your attic.”

Kuipers said the report from SIG, which counts ABN Amro, ING Bank, DHL and the Dutch government among its clients, was self-funded. He said the other risk is that Oracle, in its zeal to beat Microsoft , diverts resources for OpenOffice.org toward a commercial version (see PDF) or “fork” aimed at tackling Microsoft Office in the enterprise .

“It all hangs in the balance depending on what Larry Ellison and Oracle do with OpenOffice.org,” he said.

Sun already sells and supports a version of OpenOffice.org, called StarOffice. It has had less success pulling users from Microsoft Office than its entirely free sibling, OpenOffice.org.

Kuipers added that the risks mainly apply to large entities adopting OpenOffice.org, due to the switching costs, not to individuals and small businesses. He also said that the risks do not apply to companies adopting Lotus Symphony, an IBM-led fork of OpenOffice.org, because of IBM’s backing.

Oracle did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In an e-mail, John McCreesh, OpenOffice.org’s marketing lead (and a non-Sun employee), called the SIG report “pure speculation.”

“The OpenOffice.org community is very grateful to Sun for creating the community in the first place, and for it’s ongoing generous support. But it’s not dependent on any single sponsor for its continuing existence,” McCreesh said. He dismissed fears that OpenOffice.org users will find themselves bereft of support.

“If there is money to be made from offering commercial support to governments, etc., then market forces will ensure that the support will grow out,” he said.

Meanwhile, development for Openoffice.org continues. A second release candidate for OpenOffice.org 3.2 was released last week. New features include faster startup times, better support for OpenDocument Format and Microsoft Office Open XML documents, improvements to Calc (the Excel-like spreadsheet program), and more.

Eric Lai covers Windows and Linux, desktop applications, databases and business intelligence for Computerworld . Follow Eric on Twitter at @ericylai , send e-mail to elai@computerworld.com or subscribe to Eric’s RSS feed .

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By James Niccolai
IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)
January 21, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Oracle will provide more details about its plans for Sun Microsystems at an event next Wednesday, the same day European regulators are expected to sign off on the deal.

CEO Larry Ellison will host the event at Oracle’s headquarters in Redwood Shores, California, where executives will outline Oracle’s strategy for absorbing Sun, including details about product road maps, Oracle said in a statement.

The event, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Pacific Time, will be webcast live, the company said.

Oracle announced its plans to acquire Sun last April for US$7.4 billion. The news triggered questions about the fate of many of Sun’s products, including its Sparc servers and the MySQL open-source database it acquired earlier.

U.S. regulators approved the deal, but the European Commission, Europe’s top antitrust regulator, objected that Oracle’s ownership of MySQL would harm competition for database customers.

After much back and forth, the two sides appeared last month to be nearing an accord, and the Commission is widely expected to approve the deal next Wednesday, its deadline for reaching a decision.

When Oracle announced the deal, it said it was interested primarily in Sun’s Java and Solaris technologies, leading to speculation that Ellison would sell off or shut down Sun’s hardware divisions.

With Sun customers nervously reviewing their vendor options, Oracle has since offered assurances that it will also continue to develop Sun’s Sparc processors and server hardware. “We are definitely not going to exit the hardware business,” Ellison has said.

In one example of the type of products analysts expect from the combined company, Oracle and Sun launched a high-end data warehousing and OLTP (online transaction processing) server last September that they developed together. Called the Exadata Database Machine 2, it combines database and storage software from Oracle with Intel-based servers and flash memory technologies from Sun.

The integration of the companies’ technologies is likely to be a theme next week as well. Oracle’s invitation says attendees will learn how customers “will benefit from having all components — hardware, operating system, database, middleware, and applications — engineered to work together.”

Many questions remain, however, such as which of Sun’s server lines Oracle will continue to develop, and what will become of Sun products such as its application server and identity management software. When the deal was announced, Sun was also in the midst of rolling out a set of cloud computing services similar to those of Amazon Web Services.

Customers will be hoping for answers to those questions next week.

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By Anuradha Shukla
MIS Asia
January 14, 2010

SINGAPORE - Cloud computing is here to stay and Wipro is focused on tapping this lucrative industry. The company has announced the launch of two new solutions–digital customer experience platform and loss prevention platform–for the retail industry.

The global IT services business of Wipro has also collaborated with Oracle to launch the Oracle application integration architecture (AIA) process integration pack (PIP) for the retail industry. This co-developed solution (AIA PIP) has been designed to address some of the key financial operation control processes for retail merchandising system such as inventory valuation and revenue recognition.

Integrated toolsets

Wipro’s digital customer experience platform (DCxP) has been designed to provide an engaging customer experience. This comprehensive solution integrates social media, community features and personalisation to enable retailers to easily manage their online business.

By using DCxP, retailers will be able to ship to more than 200 countries across the world. This will open up new markets for retailers and increase their chances to generate more revenue from their business. Wipro is offering this solution on a pay-as-you-use business model and this means users will not have to spend a huge amount as upfront payment.

The loss prevention platform gives retailers an integrated view across the entire shrink management lifecycle. This platform includes an analytics suite that leverages predictive modelling to aid retailers to prevent fraud. Once installed in retailers’ systems, this platform will identify both internal and external theft, and help them see areas of shrink that previously went unnoticed.

Oracle AIA PIP integrates Oracle retail merchandise operations management and the Oracle e-business suite financials. This offers customers a pre-configured, supportable and upgradeable integration of the retail merchandising execution applications with the financial operation control applications.

Improve customer experience

Business environment has changed tremendously over the last few years and consumer behaviour is no longer the same, according to Bhanu Murthy B. M., senior vice president- retail, CPG, transportation and government, Wipro Technologies.

Murthy said this change is due to the emergence of social networks and expectations of consistent cross-channel experience. Through their new digital customer experience and loss prevention platform, Wipro is providing an integrated toolset that enables retailers to leverage these trends.

Oracle is excited about partnering with Wipro and Duncan Angove, general manager and senior vice president, Oracle retail, said its new launch will offer retail customers and partners new opportunities to maximise the value of their Oracle investments.

“The solution is designed to reduce complexity, making it easier for retailers to take advantage of opportunities for short-term value creation within their businesses while also helping to provide long-term competitive advantage,” he added.

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By Chris Kanaracus
IDG News Service (Boston Bureau)
January 14, 2010

BOSTON - Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft will invest US$250 million over three years on a product integration strategy meant to “significantly simplify” technology deployments for companies of all sizes, they said Wednesday.

The agreement will employ a new “infrastructure-to-application” model and result in prepackaged offerings that combine servers, storage, networking and software.

During a conference call, executives from both companies repeatedly insisted the pact has much more substance than a typical partnership announcement.

“This is the deepest level of collaboration and integration and technical work that we’ve done that I’m certainly aware of,” said HP CEO Mark Hurd. “This is breakthrough for us. … [Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer] and I would not be on this phone call if this was just another press release from HP and Microsoft.”

Hurd acknowledged HP and Microsoft have bundled their products in the past, but said “there’s a difference between a bundle and how deep it’s integrated and how much engineering is done.”

Cloud computing is “the driving force behind this deal at this time,” Ballmer said. Some companies may deploy applications to Microsoft’s own Azure cloud infrastructure service but others will want to use a private version, he said. “That thing is going to need to be an integrated stack from the hardware layer to the management layer to the application model,” he said. “We need to evangelize that same application model whether you host in the cloud or on-premises.”

Microsoft will be using HP hardware to support Azure, and HP will be providing services for Azure

Later this year, the partnership will spawn products around Microsoft Exchange and high-end data warehousing for SQL Server, said Bob Muglia, president of Microsoft’s server and tools business.

The deal also makes Microsoft “a preferred provider” of virtualization technology to HP. The companies plan to deliver a series of “Smart Bundles” aimed at small and medium-sized businesses. The products will combine HP servers, storage and networking technology along with Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization platform and HP’s Insight system management software.

HP will also resell Microsoft’s own System Center on its hardware and work will be done to integrate Insight with System Center.

The announcement should be viewed simply as an evolution of HP and Microsoft’s relationship and not any sort of reaction to market events, such as Oracle’s pending purchase of Sun Microsystems, according to Hurd.

That transaction, which is on hold while European regulators conduct an antitrust review, will usher Oracle into the hardware and systems business.

“[Oracle] is a great partner, but I’m here to talk about Microsoft,” Hurd said. “I think Oracle will continue to be a very important partner.”

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
January 13, 2010

Leveraging technology during a time of company reorganization and belt-tightening can be beneficial for a firm’s HR department, an executive from Oracle, a software solutions provider, said Tuesday.

Delivering the services of a company’s human resource department more effectively and efficiently can not only pull an organization out of the dump during recession, but can further propel growth once the economy recovers, the executive added.

“IT drives higher performance and profitability for any company, and this is true for the HR department as well,” said Tim Darton, general manager, HCM (Human Capital Management) solutions, Oracle Asia Pacific. “We must use IT in order to get the most out of our employees.”

Darton said a downturn is a crucial time for companies because employees are often unengaged and uncertain about their careers. “Unengaged people often underperform, especially when they don’t see that the work they do is essential to the company,” he explained.

Key to effective human resource management, according to Darton, is managing the talent pool effectively in order to keep people driven with their work. “HR should be able to identify people that contribute to the organization’s objectives, to manage those people, and to apply business objectives individually based on key performance indicators,” he elaborated.

The trade-off for veering away from this strategy could be dire, Darton said, as engaged employees tend to be five times more productive, while 44% of employees tend to look for other jobs in a tough economic climate. “HR has a role to play in the current crisis, as it helps the company identify key people and top performers, informing higher-ups of who to keep during reorganization,” the Oracle executive added.

Individuals—the heart of the business—need careful management, and technology could help on this front. “Not only can companies save money through technology, but it can also help in engaging employees, which translates on the customers,” Darton pointed out.

After three years, Oracle is following up on its HR software solution, PeopleSoft, with the release of version 9.1, the “largest” release of the software since Oracle’s acquisition of the software firm. The new release sits on PeopleTools 8.5 release, and features a whole slew of Ajax-enabled graphical dashboards that aid in faster management of HR services.

“Version 9.1 is a significant improvement over the previous release, which enables administrators to bring all pieces of pertinent information together on the application, with an option to link third party information,” Darton explained.

The new release is “significantly more advanced” than competing technology platforms, Darton said, and the only solution that is “fully web-based.” In addition, Darton said Oracle has significantly reduced the effort to customize the software for every release, with a 25% reduction in between launches.

“We are expecting majority of version 8.9 users to upgrade to the new version, with its whole line of new and improved features,” he added.

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By Marc Ferranti
IDG News Service (New York Bureau)
January 8, 2010

NEW YORK - After one of the most tumultuous decades ever for stock exchanges, the new year is starting off on an optimistic note for the tech sector, where many vendors have gained back most of the share value they lost during the Great Recession.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq on Tuesday hit 2308, the highest point it has seen since September 2008, before Wall Street collapsed as banks went out of business or were rescued by the government. The bank bust sent stock markets around the world into a tailspin and drove down shares of IT vendors to levels not seen since the trough of the dot-com crash in 2003.

Since the beginning of last year, however, the Nasdaq Composite has increased by 40 percent in value. Nasdaq computer stocks have jumped 63 percent while the exchange’s telecom shares have increased 40 percent. In comparison, the broader New York Stock Exchange Composite index has increased 23 percent and the Dow Jones Industrials has gained 17 percent.

The comparative share values indicate a broad-based faith that technology is helping to lead the world’s economy out of the recession. Market research companies such as IDC have said that global IT spending this year will return to the 2008 level of about US$1.5 trillion. Optimism about IT was reinforced last month when bellwether vendors such as Oracle and Research in Motion reported quarterly sales revenue that exceeded year-earlier figures.

During the first trading week of the new decade, several new reports gave additional impetus to the high hopes for tech. On Monday the Semiconductor Industry Association issued a report estimating that global semiconductor sales in November hit $22.6 billion, rising 3.7 percent from October. It was the ninth-straight month of sequential gains, and the first month in 2009 that exceeded the year-earlier figure for chip sales, according to the SIA.

The hardware sector did not do as badly as some had feared in 2009, mainly as a result of consumer interest in netbooks and high-end mobile devices. Over the next three years, smartphone users will exceed a billion, according to a report by Futuresource Consulting.

“Last year, mobile phone ownership exceeded four billion users - which equates to nearly 60 percent of the world’s population,” wrote David Luu, senior analyst at Futuresource. “And in the face of a handset market which is slowing on the whole, smartphone sales are rising fast, with our year-end forecasts for 2009 showing smartphone sales representing 17 percent of total handset shipments. By 2013, more than one billion people will own a smartphone.”

At the CES show in Las Vegas this week, a wide range of vendors have been showing off next-generation mobile devices and chips. Among other announcements, Motorola announced the Backflip, Palm updated the Pre, Microsoft and Dell showed off slate computers, Lenovo launched laptops that double as tablets, and Intel announced next-generation chips for both laptops and desktops.

Meanwhile, comScore reported this week that, for the full U.S. holiday online shopping season, $29.1 billion was spent online, a 4 percent increase compared to the same period last year

A spate of mergers and acquisitions is also helping give the sense that the IT sector remains dynamic, as vendors look to quickly ramp up on cutting-edge technology. Among the acquisitions announced this week:

–Oracle said Monday that it bought Silver Creek Systems, which offers software that helps companies simplify and standardize product descriptions.

–EMC said Monday that it would buy Archer Technologies, which develops governance, risk and compliance software.

–BMC said Thursday that it acquired Phurnace Software, a maker of products designed to help deploy Java applications.

–Apple confirmed Tuesday that it acquired Quattro Wireless, which makes an ad-serving, tracking and analytics platform that observers said could help the iPhone maker generate more revenue from online sales.

Terms for these deals were not disclosed, though the Wall Street Journal reported the Apple acquisition was worth $275 million.

On Thursday, Google and video-compression technology maker On2 Technologies said that the search giant is sweetening its bid for the company, adding $0.15 per share to its August offer. Google offered 0.0010 of a share of Google Class A Common Stock for each share of On2 common stock in August. At the time the offer was made, it was worth about $106 million. On2 shareholders apparently declined the deal, but the new offer amounts to an extra $26 million in cash, in consideration for the rise in Google shares since August. Google shares hit a 52-week high Tuesday, closing at $623.99.

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By Chris Kanaracus
IDG News Service (Boston Bureau)
January 5, 2010

BOSTON - A petition launched in December by MySQL creator Michael “Monty” Widenius to “save” the open-source database from Oracle has quickly gained momentum, collecting nearly 17,000 signatures.

Widenius on Monday submitted an initial batch of 14,174 signatures to the European Commission, which is conducting an antitrust review of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, MySQL’s current owner. European authorities had expressed concern over the future of MySQL under Oracle, which holds a major chunk of the database market with its own proprietary software.

The petition calls for authorities to block the merger unless Oracle agrees to one of three “solutions,” including spinning off MySQL to a third party and releasing all past versions and subsequent editions for the next three years under the Apache 2.0 open-source license.

About 5,500 of the signatories on the initial submission list are identified as self-employed software developers. Another 3,155 work for companies that use MySQL. The remaining are listed as “private users” of the database or are “concerned about MySQL’s future for some other reason.”

Nearly 7,000 respondents are from European Union member states, followed by about 3,300 in the U.S. and 2,800 in the rest of the world.

As of Monday, almost 94 percent supported the notion of Oracle divesting MySQL.

“Countless blogs, websites, encyclopedias are based on MySQL. It is the engine of the internet community, and with it one of the pillars of modern society, the support for freedom of speech,” one signatory from Austria wrote. “I do not believe in big companies’ promises to have an eye on the community - there’s just too much money involved!”

“MySQL powers the majority of innovative database deployments. It’s open nature allows for high-level modification enabling sites like Facebook to harden it for high demand/minimal hardware configurations,” a U.S. signatory said. “Oracle is the least likely candidate for a guardian of this technology, it would be like giving the keys to heaven to the devil for safekeeping.”

While Oracle has released a statement containing 10 commitments to MySQL users, including a promise to invest more money in development, Widenius maintains those pledges don’t go far enough.

But European authorities responded favorably to Oracle’s overture, and the merger could be approved imminently.

Despite the apparent success of Widenius’ signature drive, other observers have said concerns over MySQL’s fate are overblown, since the databases don’t directly compete and MySQL can survive through offshoot “forks” like Widenius’ own MariaDB.

To that end, Widenius himself has drawn fire from some critics, who consider his motives self-serving.

He may be hoping to “pinch Oracle’s improved code and basically have his MySQL money and access to the MySQL code as it improves so he can plug it into his branch,” user “thetoadwarrior” posted on a Slashdot thread in December. “No one should take his opinion seriously because if he really cared then it wouldn’t have sold it.”

But forking a project like MySQL is easier said than done, Widenius said in a blog post on Dec. 28.

“There is very little chance that a fork can get enough money to do the needed development when there are very few companies that can use the fork to generate direct revenue,” he wrote. “There are also very few investors that are prepared to put money into a product with no sure income stream and a model that is only based on services.”

In addition, a fork “can’t be used with other products that are using MySQL as a building block for their closed source applications,” Widenius said.

The company Widenius formed around MariaDB, Monty Program, focuses on new database features and support for companies that use MariaDB.

Forking MySQL has not been easy, according to Widenius.

“I have the best possible team working on MariaDB, still it has taken us 9 months to do some small required changes and create an infrastructure to be able to do our first release,” he wrote. “We are spending 100,000 Euros/months just to keep MySQL alive (as MariaDB) and there are no sure signs we will ever be able to get that money back. Fortunately we have enough funding so we can continue some years with doing this. This is however not sustainable forever.”

Monty Program wouldn’t benefit greatly from the proposals in the petition, Widenius said. For one, if MySQL was divested to a “strong player” that was committed to its further development, Monty Program would gain a strong competitor, he said.

The company doesn’t expect to make much money, Widenius said. “It’s more important for us that MySQL will continue to be free, available for all, and developed in a way that meets the needs of all major market segments.”

An Oracle spokeswoman declined comment.

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At the Connect Strategy to Success seminar, Oracle addressed organizations’ need for management excellence to meet today’s business and economic challenges and still stay ahead in the global market.

Oracle introduced the Strategy-to-Success framework designed to help organizations to be more responsive and agile in the midst of economic uncertainties. Geared towards management excellence, the framework involves a series of interrelated management processes aligned with key performance indicators that are derived from enterprise performance management techniques and technologies.

Management excellence is the art of reconciling all stakeholder needs and deriving the most value from the performance network. This is achieved by transforming management activities into integrated management processes and by connecting management processes to operational processes and systems.

Driving management excellence is Oracle’s Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) system, the industry’s most comprehensive, fully integrated EPM solution.

Oracle EPM System delivers the foundation, applications and seamless integration needed to transform management processes in the value chain, and optimize performance through improved business insights and decision making.

“Management excellence enables the transformation in the role of CFO’s/Finance office. It encompasses three key paradigms of strategize, plan and monitor execution in a holistic manner that provides organizations the next competitive edge, in every market around the world,” said Ravi Tirumalai, Marketing Director for EPM/BI and GRC, Oracle Asia Pacific. “Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System brings management processes under a single umbrella, connecting performance management and business intelligence applications with transactional systems to provide a comprehensive management picture.”

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At the recent Oracle Technology Summit attended by C-level executives from across different industries, Oracle presented the key capabilities of Oracle Database 11g Release 2. This new release features enhancements to grid computing, storage management and administration capabilities.

The company clains tha by deploying Oracle Database 11g Release 2 within the IT architecture, organizations can look to leverage the full power of the world’s leading database to reduce their hardware storage costs, improve their system performance by a factor of 10; dramatically simplify their software portfolio; double productivity of their IT personnel, and quickly realize business value.

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By Chris Kanaracus
IDG News Service (Boston Bureau)
November 12, 2009

BOSTON - SAP said Wednesday it contacted Oracle and its CEO, Larry Ellison, in recent months over concerns about the future of the Java programming language and competition in the database market, not to offer help facilitating Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems, which is being held up by a European antitrust review.

The statement follows a recent Wall Street Journal editorial that speculated about the latter possibility. The editorial was based on a letter sent to Ellison on Sept. 15 by SAP CEO Léo Apotheker, which consisted of the following statement, according to the Journal:

“As you know, we have significant concerns about Oracle’s proposed takeover of Sun. We renew our invitation to meet to attempt to resolve our concerns and other open issues between our companies. Please let us know if and when you would like to meet.”

The Journal noted that “other issues” between the two companies include an ongoing intellectual property lawsuit Oracle filed against SAP in connection with TomorrowNow, a now-shuttered subsidiary of SAP that provided third-party support for Oracle applications.

SAP “strongly rejects” the editorial’s “misleading speculation,” Wednesday’s statement said, reiterating remarks by an SAP spokesman earlier this week.

Instead, SAP has “concerns about customer choice in the database market and the future open licensing of Java,” and first contacted Oracle and Sun about the matter “as far back as the end of July 2009.”

“Since there was no response, our CEO Léo Apotheker took the initiative and wrote to both Oracle and Sun CEOs in the middle of September to voice our concerns again, offer a dialogue, and attempt to clarify the issues. We have not heard back from Oracle, but instead found Léo Apotheker’s letter leaked to the press last week,” the statement adds. “This is both telling and disappointing as it demonstrates that there is no real interest by Oracle to listen and explain how it wants to ensure the required level of customer choice in the database market as well as open access to Java.”

In a blog post on Monday, SAP CTO Vishal Sikka also called for more openness in Java.

Meanwhile, this week the European Commission issued a formal statement of objections to Oracle and Sun regarding the merger. The body is particularly concerned over the fate of Sun’s open-source MySQL database if it comes under Oracle’s ownership.

An Oracle spokeswoman declined comment.

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By James Niccolai
IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)
November 10, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - The European Commission on Monday issued its formal “statement of objections” over Oracle’s planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems, saying the deal would harm competition in the database market.

Oracle responded that it would “vigorously oppose” the Commission, saying its position reflects “a profound misunderstanding of both database competition and open source dynamics.” The U.S. Department of Justice, which has already approved the deal, also weighed in, saying it studied the deal carefully and concluded that it is “unlikely to be anticompetitive.”

The statement of objections was rumored to be imminent last week, and follows the Commission’s decision in September to launch an in-depth probe of Oracle’s planned Sun acquisition. It is a procedural step in European antitrust investigations that paves the way for Oracle to make a formal response.

“The Statement of Objections sets out the Commission’s preliminary assessment regarding, and is limited to, the combination of Sun’s open source MySQL database product with Oracle’s enterprise database products and its potential negative effects on competition in the market for database products,” Sun said in a regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The statement of objections is “a preparatory document” and does not necessarily mean the Commission will block the merger, Sun said. It also noted that any final decision can be appealed.

The text of the Commission’s objections to Oracle was not released publicly. The Commission is supposed to issue a ruling on the matter by Jan. 19.

Oracle announced its plan to acquire Sun in April for US$7.4 billion. The deal was approved by U.S. competition regulators after a brief review, but the Commission said it was concerned about the effects of the acquisition on Sun’s MySQL open-source database, which it acquired last year.

In a foretaste of the arguments it will present to the Commission, Oracle asserted in a statement Monday that the deal “does not threaten to reduce competition in the slightest, including in the database market.”

“It is well understood by those knowledgeable about open source software that because MySQL is open source, it cannot be controlled by anyone. That is the whole point of open source,” Oracle said.

It characterized the database market as “intensely competitive with at least eight strong players, including IBM, Microsoft, Sybase and three distinct open source vendors.”

It also argued that the deal is “essential for competition” in the high-end server market because it would revitalize Sun’s Sparc processor and Solaris OS platforms. It would also strengthen the Java development platform, according to Oracle.

“Given the lack of any credible theory or evidence of competitive harm, we are confident we will ultimately obtain unconditional clearance of the transaction,” the company said.

Oracle is no stranger to antitrust investigations. The U.S. Department of Justice tried to block Oracle’s acquisition of PeopleSoft on the grounds that it would unacceptably contract the enterprise software applications market to two large players, Oracle and SAP.

Oracle won that case in 2004, by convincing U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker that there were many other competitors in that market, albeit smaller ones.

The DOJ issued its own statement Monday explaining its decision to approve the Sun-Oracle deal. It said there are “many open-source and proprietary database competitors” and that there is a large community of open-source developers with expertise in maintaining and improving Sun’s open-source software.

“At this point in its process, it appears that the EC holds a different view,” the DOJ said. “We remain hopeful that the parties and the EC will reach a speedy resolution that benefits consumers in the Commission’s jurisdiction.”

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has said that Sun is losing $100 million per month as it waits for the deal to close.

On Friday Sun released its financial results for the last quarter, ended Sept. 27. Revenue was $2.24 billion, down from $2.99 billion a year earlier. Its losses narrowed to $120 million, from $1.68 billion in the same quarter last year, thanks largely to cost-cutting efforts.

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By Paul Meller
IDG News Service (Brussels Bureau)
November 5, 2009

BRUSSELS - Oracle is planning an aggressive fight with European regulators if its attempt to take over Sun is slapped with a statement of objections in the coming week, said people close to the company Wednesday.

Unsourced news reports that a statement of objections is imminent surfaced earlier Wednesday. The European Commission declined to comment on the reports, but confirmed that if such a step was to be taken it would have to be taken soon, in order to allow enough time for procedures leading up to the Jan. 19 deadline for a ruling.

“The ball game would change dramatically if the Commission issues a statement of objections,” said one person familiar with Oracle’s thinking who insisted on anonymity.

He added: “Oracle has been holding back until now, and contrary to what the Commission says it has addressed the substance of the Commission’s concerns about the deal in huge abundance.”

When the Commission opened an in-depth probe of the Oracle-Sun deal at the beginning of September, it said it was concerned about the deal’s impact on the market for software that runs corporate databases.

Sun owns MySQL, an open-source challenger to the big three makers of proprietary database technology: IBM, Microsoft and the market leader, Oracle.

Oracle is unwilling to sell off MySQL because it is “a strategic imperative of the deal,” the person said. Oracle needs MySQL in order to compete with Microsoft in markets such as the one for small and medium-size corporate clients, he said.

“This deal is the most transformational deal in the history of the IT industry. It will enhance competition, not erode it, by creating a more viable counterweight to Microsoft,” another person close to the merging companies said, also on condition that she wasn’t named.

The frustration with European competition regulators is palpable, she said. The European Commission was notified of the deal at the beginning of August — a time when many Commission officials are away on holiday.

The chances of getting a quick thumbs-up in Brussels were not strengthened by the timing, as less-experienced officials were left to handle the notification, she said.

“It’s not ideal to have your deal handled by the B-team at the start. It can send a review off in the wrong direction. It looks like that’s what has happened with Oracle/Sun,” this person said.

If the Commission does issue formal objections to the deal it will mean war, said the person familiar with Oracle’s thinking. In reference to the most controversial merger ruling by the Commission in recent years, he said the transatlantic political storm that would be unleashed if the Commission blocked Oracle/Sun “would be like GE/Honeywell on steroids.”

General Electric’s planned takeover of aeronautics firm Honeywell was cleared in the U.S., just as the Oracle/Sun deal was. But it was blocked in 2001 by the European Commission.

During the buildup to that ruling, senior U.S. politicians including President George W. Bush intervened to try to save the deal. Although the political landscape has shifted dramatically with the arrival of Barack Obama in the White House, the person close to Oracle said the political fallout from a European prohibition of the Oracle/Sun deal would be even more intense.

“While GE was arguing with the Commission, not one job at Honeywell was lost. Sun has lost thousands and faces going out of business if this deal fails,” the person said, pointing out that GE/Honeywell happened when the U.S. economy was strong, unlike now, when unemployment has reached almost 10 percent in the U.S..

“Senior politicians including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi are ready to intervene on Oracle’s and Sun’s behalf but have been asked to hold fire for now,” he said. Pelosi has close political and personal ties with Sun’s hometown of San Francisco.

“If the Commission issues an SO (statement of objections) in the coming week it will be gloves-off time — no more holding back,” the person close to Oracle said.

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By Stephen Lawson
IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)
October 20, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - AT&T on Monday made another grab for business mobile users, introducing two more hosted applications built on its Mobile Enterprise Applications Platform.

Like other mobile operators and vendors, the second-largest wireless carrier in the U.S. is targeting enterprises as a growth opportunity. Along with paving the way for machine-to-machine applications that could provide a steady stream of data usage for years to come, AT&T and others are trying to get businesses to integrate smartphones more deeply in their business operations. Last week, Samsung Electronics America introduced a cloud-based service that can adapt Oracle databases and other applications within enterprises for use on mobile phones.

AT&T introduced MEAP in September 2008 as a platform on which enterprises could develop, deploy and manage applications that extended back-end systems to mobile devices. It uses middleware from Antenna Software that lets enterprises configure an application once to work with BlackBerries, Windows Mobile devices and iPhones, minimizing the work involved in reaching all the devices, said Igor Glubochansky, a director in AT&T’s mobility product management organization. MEAP includes three basic types of capabilities — sales force and field force automation and IT support — as building blocks for other services. The back-end systems it can support include Oracle, SAP and custom in-house applications.

In addition to the applications created by individual enterprises, which can be run in-house or hosted by AT&T, the carrier has identified certain vertical-market uses for mobile that are fairly similar from one organization to the next, Glubochansky said. For these “repeatable” use cases, AT&T can build ready-made applications, he said. A MEAP pharmaceutical sales application has been available for several months already.

On Monday, the carrier introduced AT&T MEAP: Merchandising for the Consumer Goods Industry and AT&T MEAP: Maintenance and Repair for Hospitality. Both are hosted by AT&T and designed to run on Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices. The iPhone isn’t often used by workers in these fields, Glubochansky said.

The merchandising application is designed for workers who deliver products, especially foods and beverages, and monitor how those goods are selling and are displayed and promoted in each store. The mobile software lets them submit forms and reports instantly on a smartphone instead of filling out paper forms and turning them in at the end of the day, so supplies can be replenished and billed for more quickly, Glubochansky said.

The mobile application for hospitality is designed to help maintenance workers at large hotels and other facilities communicate quickly about their ongoing tasks and urgent situations that require a response. It allows them to access and update work orders and service requests in real time, automatically escalate incidents and receive alerts when staff members don’t respond. Although some of AT&T’s smartphones include push-to-talk capability, the application doesn’t make use of it, Glubochansky said.

The hosted applications are available now. Because it sells them to each business customer on a case-by-case basis, the carrier doesn’t have listed prices for the offerings. AT&T has identified other common applications for certain industries and is planning more of such prepared applications, according to Glubochansky. Manufacturing is one area with some potential, he said.

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By Chris Kanaracus
IDG News Service (Boston Bureau)
October 15, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - Oracle plans to launch its long-awaited Fusion Applications in 2010, and they will be deployable both on-premises and as SaaS (software as a service), CEO Larry Ellison said Wednesday during a keynote address at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

Fusion Applications, which Oracle first announced several years ago, will combine the best elements of Oracle’s various business software product lines into a next-generation suite. Oracle has placed special emphasis on improving the user experience with Fusion, as well as embedded BI (business intelligence) throughout the applications, Ellison said.

Ellison’s keynote contained the most specific information the company has provided about Fusion Applications since first announcing the project several years ago. The CEO took pains to tell the packed room of Siebel, JD Edwards and E-Business Suite users that Oracle has no plans to abandon the product lines anytime soon.

“Oracle will continue to enhance those applications for the next decade and beyond. We’re absolutely committed to do that,” he said to applause. “We can afford to not only maintain the software you’re running today, but also build the software you may want to move to tomorrow.”

Ellison did not provide details regarding licensing and pricing models, including whether Oracle will sell the new applications via subscription, as is the norm with SaaS.

But Oracle is nonetheless ensuring the products are ready for SaaS, including by developing monitoring tools that will track their performance, Ellison said.

While SaaS vendors provide users with service-level agreement guarantees, “there aren’t very good tools for figuring out whether you’re actually getting the service levels you’re paying for,” he said. Oracle’s tools will enable it to “not only contractually commit but prove we’re delivering the service levels.”

Fusion Applications are based on a SOA (service oriented architecture) provided by Oracle’s Fusion Middleware stack, Ellison said.

This gives Oracle “a huge advantage” because the SOA model will allow users easily to tie together “the Fusion generation and all the stuff you have deployed today,” Ellison said.

“We don’t think all customers are going to replace what they have today with Fusion,” he added. “We think they will augment what they have with some Fusion. Fusion is designed to be delivered that way. … We have replacement applications and then we have net-new applications.”

The initial suite will include modules for financial management, human capital management, sales and marketing, supply chain management, project management, procurement management and GRC (governance, risk and compliance), but other key areas, such as manufacturing, will come later.

Ellison stressed the benefits of the modular approach. “You assemble the components in the order you want to use them, in the order that makes sense for your industry,” he said.

Oracle has worked “very, very closely” with customers to design and test Fusion Applications, work that has resulted in a superior user interface, Ellison said.

Embedded BI is another major focus of the suite. “You can’t use the system without using business intelligence,” Ellison said.

In a demonstration, a pair of Oracle executives showed how the system alerted one user that a particular shipment had been delayed. The application allowed the user to bring up a dashboard showing which order manager was responsible for the particular transaction, and then begin an instant-messaging conversation with him directly from the tool. In turn, the order manager was able to search for less critical orders and reroute them to fulfill the first one.

“We tell you what you need to know, what you need to do, and we tell you how to do it,” Ellison said.

Ellison’s presentation proved that “Fusion apps are real,” said Ray Wang, a partner with the analyst firm Altimeter Group.

While Oracle “definitely has the capability to deliver this as SaaS, it’s really up to them to figure out if they want to enter [that market] large-scale,” Wang added. In some product areas, such as talent management, “they can’t compete without the SaaS option,” he said.

SaaS applications are different from straight application hosting, because they use a “multitenant” architecture wherein customers share a single instance of an application but their data is kept private from other customers. In a presentation Tuesday, on-demand CRM (customer relationship management) vendor and Oracle rival Salesforce.com compared multitenancy to an office building, where individual tenants share the overall infrastructure but customize their office spaces.

Oracle “will definitely” offer a hosted version of Fusion Applications, although it remains to be seen exactly how their SaaS strategy for the software plays out, Wang said.

When Fusion Applications arrive, they will also raise the competitive stakes between Oracle and its main rival, SAP.

But SAP spokesman Saswato Das dismissed Oracle’s announcement.

“Basically, our Business Suite 7 is the most comprehensive and flexible suite of applications on the market,” Das said. “Oracle has been talking about Fusion for a long time, and our suite is available now. They’re playing catch-up.”

Meanwhile, the work ahead of companies looking to adopt Fusion Applications sooner rather than later is “not trivial,” said Floyd Teter, head of the Oracle Applications Users Group’s Fusion Council, which has been educating group members about the upcoming applications release.

One key step customers should take is to catalogue their application customizations and determine which ones could be retired, Teter said. “A lot of us have done a lot of custom things. If you’re a long-term Oracle customer, it’s easy to lose track.”

Fusion Applications will also require some companies to acquire new development skills, Teter said. “A lot of us run a lot of customizations through MOD PL_SQL. That’s going to be gone. The skill set now is more Java and specifically [Java Enterprise Edition]. You also better have some knowledge of JavaScript.”

In addition, Fusion Applications rely on Oracle’s JDeveloper IDE (integrated development environment), rather than other Java development tools like Eclipse.

For many companies, there will be plenty of time to plan, since the first version of Fusion Applications won’t include certain functional areas.

The lack of manufacturing has prompted the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, which uses E-Business Suite, to wait for a future version, said Teter, who is a project manager at the lab. “When I get a full-functionality replacement, we’ll look at it. In the meantime, we’ll continue to stay current on EBS.”

But Teter said the vendor’s work on Fusion has produced impressive results, particularly in regards to user experience.

Earlier in his keynote, Ellison turned to Oracle’s recently announced Exadata 2 appliance for data warehousing and transaction processing. He claimed the machine widely outperforms and is much less expensive than competing technologies, such as from IBM, calling it “the fastest computer that has ever been built to run data warehousing applications.”

“This system will outperform any of the competition,” he said.

Exadata 2 uses Sun hardware, while the original machine, announced at last year’s OpenWorld show, used Hewlett-Packard iron.

Oracle is in the process of buying Sun Microsystems but the deal is on hold while European officials conduct an antitrust review.

Ellison didn’t discuss the acquisition during his keynote, but Sun and its officials have played an active role in this year’s OpenWorld conference.

Ellison temporarily ceded the stage to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who delivered a joke-peppered talk espousing the value of technology, from biotech to the Hollywood special effects that powered his long career as an action star.

“Think of Conan the Barbarian fighting the giant snake,” he said, referring to his role in the 1982 film based on Robert E. Howard’s tales of a legendary warrior king. “I never could have done that and look so studly without technology,” he said to an eruption of laughter from the crowd.

Schwarzenegger also congratulated Ellison and Sun chairman Scott McNealy on the pending acquisition, stressing the companies’ importance to California’s economy. “Working together, I know the sky is the limit for you and your employees,” he said.

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Computerworld Philippines Staff
October 14, 2009

Citing the need to consolidate siloed processes and data across all its branches worldwide, local fast food chain Jollibee has recently lifted its operations to the cloud using NetSuite OneWorld, a cloud-based management solution that aids operations across all steps of the supply chain, the company said in a statement recently.

With new stores opening at an average of one every two days, the company said it needed a solution which will quickly provide infrastructure on a tight schedule. “NetSuite OneWorld’s built-in support for multiple currencies, multiple regions, subsidiary relationships and rapid deployment make it an ideal choice for a global, fast-growing business,” it said.

Jollibee currently has 1,800 restaurants worldwide—300 of which are located outside the Philippines—with nearly 200 new stores opening each year.

“NetSuite OneWorld gives us a way to deliver a standard platform across the organization in a timeframe and at a cost that supports our continued growth and development,” said Ysmael Baysa, CFO, Jollibee.

The home-grown Filipino restaurant chain has already deployed the NetSuite solution across all its branches in Vietnam, providing granular performance analysis, online supply ordering, consolidated reporting and a complete audit trail in the country.

The company said it adopted the NetSuite solution to have a “solution with needed capabilities, rapid deployment, and a reliable, proven integration processes” across all its international branches. Its previous processes, it added, relied on Oracle Financials, which didn’t provide for a clear reporting and integration process.

Moreover, the solution allows for integration with existing legacy applications, which will enable its head office to have “real-time visibility into the core aspects of its [international] operations.” In addition, since the acquisition is based on a cloud computing model, costs are significantly lowered than when acquiring full-blown business applications.

Because of this milestone, Jollibee said it is poised to take its NetSuite wins to its Chinese counterparts before the end of the year, enabling a consolidated view of business operations across 190 stores in the Asian giant region. Stores in Taiwan, the United States and other Asian markets will follow suit, it added. – John Mark V. Tuazon

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By Paul Krill
InfoWorld (US)
October 13, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - Sun Microsystems Chairman Scott McNealy and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison both took the stage at the Oracle OpenWorld 2009 conference Sunday evening to offer reassurances that Sun technologies will not go away should Oracle complete its planned acquisition of Sun.

From Java to the Solaris OS to the Sparc CPU platform and Sun storage technologies, Oracle will be good for all of them, the executives stressed at the San Francisco event. As a matter of fact, combining Sun’s research and development budget with Sun’s presents “one of the great R&D opportunities of all time,” McNealy said.

Oracle, for example, intends to spend more money developing Sparc than Sun does now, he said. “That’s a good sign for Sparc innovation,” McNealy said.

“You look at the core technologies that we’re developing: They’re going to find a nice home in this next chapter,” he said, referring to merger.

Ellison, for his part, took exception with IBM for suggesting Oracle was not committed to Sun’s wares, particularly Sun hardware. “We’re looking forward to competing with IBM in the systems [business] and we think the combination of Sun and Oracle [is] well-equipped to compete successfully against the giant,” Ellison said.
Ellison said he would give $10 million to anyone — any major company or enterprise — whose existing database application would not run at least twice as fast on Sun gear. The challenge would be part of a new ad campaign. But he acknowledged Oracle recently was fined $10,000 for running a recent ad comparing Sun and Oracle to IBM, in which the benchmark evidence had not yet been documented. His explanation cited overzealousness on Oracle’s part.
“If IBM wants to compete, we’re happy to compete and we made a series of commitments,” Ellison said. Solaris, meanwhile, is the leading enterprise OS and the leading OS for running the Oracle database, he said.

“We said we’re not selling the hardware business and we think Sparc is a fantastic technology. And with a little more investment, it could be even better,” said Ellison.
Oracle also plans to increase its investment in the open source MySQL database, Ellison said. He added that Oracle already has continued to invest in the Innobase technology it acquired that serves as the transaction engine in MySQL. There had been speculation that Oracle bought Innobase “to kill it,” but that has not happened at all, Ellison stressed. MySQL currently is owned by Sun.
IBM had been a rumored suitor for Sun prior to Oracle forging a deal to buy the company nearly six months ago. The sale remains held up by the European Union, which is concerned over commercial database giant Oracle owning MySQL. Recently, Ellison said Sun has been losing $100 million a month waiting for the sale to close. McNealy said efforts to close the sale were proceeding with authorities.
To argue on behalf of Oracle’s commitment to Java, McNealy brought Sun Vice President James Gosling, considered the father of Java, onstage. Oracle’s product mix features Java and the company has participated in numerous Java Specification Requests (JSR), Gosling said. The JSR process is used to submit modifications to the platform to the community at large.

Oracle, though, has been a bit unprepared for the volume of activity in the Java world, Gosling, said. “We do 15 million downloads of the JRE (Java Runtime Edition) a week on average,” he said.

Also appearing onstage at OpenWorld was John Fowler, Sun vice president of system. “My team is excited about working closely with Oracle because we have been working with Oracle now [for] what’s measured in decades,” Fowler said. He lauded recent Sun-Oracle performance benchmarks and noted the recently introduced Sun-Oracle Exadata Database Machine Version 2, which combines Sun hardware with Oracle’s database and storage management software. Fowler also announced the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array, which integrates 1.6TB of Flash storage into a device that looks like a server.

McNealy cited a long list of Sun accomplishments, including the Network File System, the various editions of Java, Sparc’s being the first 64-bit volume RISC architecture, and the company’s contributions to open source, including its use of Berkeley Unix. “We were the Red Hat of Berkeley Unix,” he said.

In a brief interview after the evening presentation, Tim Bray, Sun’s director of Web technologies, would not comment on whether the Sun name would go away as part of the merger with Oracle or whether Sun would become a division of Oracle.

In a Top 10 list entitled “Top 10 Signs Engineers Have Gone Wild,” McNealy took potshots at Apple for not supporting Java on its iPhone. “Friends don’t let friends type on an iPhone especially since it doesn’t run Java. Are you listening, Steve,” McNealy said, referring to Apple CEO Steve Jobs. “[The iPhone is] the only device on the planet that doesn’t run Java.”

He also ridiculed President Barack Obama’s winning of the Nobel Peace prize last week, without mentioning the President by name. One of the engineering signs on McNealy’s list pertained to a Nobel prize for a gas mask bra, leading McNealy to follow the reference with a comment that such an award was “no more ridiculous than some other Nobel prizes that I’ve heard of.”

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By Lucas Mearian
Computerworld (US)
October 6, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - Brocade Communications Systems Inc. has hung a “for sale” sign on its door, according to a report today in the Wall Street Journal . Brocade declined to comment on the report.

Hewlett-Packard Co. and Oracle Corp. have shown interest in buying Brocade, which make switches for routing data storage traffic, according to the report, which added that an agreement is not imminent.

Brocade is said to be valued at about $3.2 billion. The company reported a loss of $21 million on sales of about $493.3 million in the its 2009 fiscal year’s third quarter that ended Aug. 1.

San Jose-based Brocade has about 2,800 employees.

Brocade late last year acquired Foundry Networks Inc. whose IP networking technology gives it a leg up in the server networking market, and puts it in a stronger competitive position rival Cisco Systems Inc.

“The question is: ‘do the server vendors want to increase the competitive pressure against Cisco because Cisco is now in the server business?’” said Brian Babineau, an analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Mass. “I think that’s what makes Brocade more attractive, and you can consider Oracle in the server business as well because they plan to own Sun .”

Babineau said he has heard rumors as recently as last week about Brocade putting itself on the block. If true, he added, the timing isn’t surprising.

Over the past seven or so years, switch maker Cisco has added a line of storage switches and routers that make it a heavy player in the storage business. Just last month, it was reported that Cisco and EMC Corp. were in talks to create a technology services arm. Earlier this year, Cisco, EMC and others said they jointly developed a new storage blade server to be sold by Cisco.

Brocade has also been making moves to attract new sales channels by signing reseller agreements with EMC rivals IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co. and quasi-competitor Dell Inc.

Dell has increased its presence in business-class data storage systems over the past few years, originally through reseller deals with EMC and recently with its own line of data storage products that are moving from entry-level to midrange. Dell’s acquisition of storage vendor EqualLogic two years ago likely placed a strain on its reseller relationship with EMC.

Babineau said Hewlett-Packard may be the most appropriate suitor for Brocade because it has an established networking and a storage portfolio of products, and because Cisco is increasingly competitive with HP .

“It’s very logical. If you look at the timing, it’s almost like a perfect storm for Brocade,” Babineau said. “Exiting a Foundry integration process, potential uptick in IT spending starting shortly, and big IT companies wanting to compete against Cisco with Brocade being one of the only viable candidates in that market.”

“This is not about storage, but about networking,” he added.

Another source, who asked not to be named, said that HP executive Dave Donatelli , who had headed EMC’s storage unit until earlier this year, could help HP position Brocade’s storage offerings against those of his former firm. “I just think Donatelli has some real institutional knowledge after selling a good portion of Brocade’s products when he was with EMC,” the source said.

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By James Niccolai
IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)
September 17, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - Oracle has launched a high-end database and storage system that it co-developed with Sun Microsystems, the companies’ first joint product since announcing their plans to merge almost five months ago.

Called the Exadata Database Machine Version 2, it combines Intel-based servers and other Sun hardware with Oracle’s database and storage management software in a rack-based system optimized for enterprise data warehousing and high-speed online transaction processing (OLTP).

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled the product on a webcast Tuesday from Oracle’s California headquarters, where he was joined by John Fowler, executive vice president in charge of Sun’s systems business. The system uses an unusually large amount of flash memory — up to 5TB in a fully loaded rack — to achieve high levels of OLTP performance, Ellison said.

Neither of the executives made any reference to the companies’ pending merger, which Oracle had hoped to close by now but which has been held up by competition regulators in Europe. Nor did they disclose any more information about which Sun products Oracle will support or discontinue if the merger goes through.

The system that launched Tuesday uses Linux, rather than Sun Solaris, and Intel-type processors, rather than Sun’s Ultrasparc T2 chips, as some had expected. But Oracle has pledged to support Sun’s Sparc platform in the future.

The Exadata system is a follow-on to a similar product that Oracle developed last year with Hewlett-Packard. Both systems combine database servers, storage servers and networking in a rack-based system preconfigured with Oracle’s software.

The first Exadata system was for data warehousing only, Ellison said, while Exadata 2 is for both data warehousing and online transaction processing. “Exadata Version 1 was the world’s fastest machine for data warehousing applications,” he said. “Exadata Version 2 is twice as fast as Exadata Version 1 for data warehousing, and it’s the only database machine that runs OLTP applications.”

The first version was based on HP’s Intel-based ProLiant G5 servers, while the new machine uses Sun Fire X4275 servers with Intel’s quad-core Nehalem processors. It also uses a faster memory type, DDR3, and faster disk and InfiniBand components, Ellison said, explaining the performance boost over the first Exadata.

But the main advance is a new flash-based memory system from Sun that is used in the storage servers. Called FlashFire, it packs four flash accelerator cards into each storage server, each with a capacity of 96GB. A fully loaded rack with eight storage servers has 5TB of flash memory, as well as 100TB of SAS disk capacity or 336TB of SATA disk capacity, Ellison said.

“We have a huge, fast flash cache built into our storage servers,” Ellison said. “These are not flash disks — make no mistake, these are not flash disks. This is a smart memory hierarchy made up of DRAM in our database servers and flash in our storage servers, with very sophisticated algorithms. This is a very smart memory hierarchy where the Oracle software manages that memory extremely efficiently, much faster than flash disk.”

The use of flash memory and InfiniBand allows the system to perform 1 million I/O operations per second, according to Ellison. “We can move data much more rapidly than any other computer in the world,” he claimed.

All that speed comes at a price. A full rack configuration, with eight database servers and 14 storage servers, starts at US$1.15 million for the database hardware alone, according to a price list. The Oracle database software and Exadata Storage Software are extra, as are the storage hardware and installation fees.

The system is also offered in half-rack, quarter-rack and single-server configurations, however. The entry product starts at $115,000 for the database server hardware.

“I think it’s incredible the amount of flash they’re using,” said Dan Olds, principal analyst with Gabriel Consulting Group. “It’s not quite an in-memory database, but it’s not far off it. Couple that with the Nehalem processors and the InfiniBand, and that’s where the OLTP performance is coming from.”

Terms of use are “quite restrictive, though,” he noted, pointing to an Oracle FAQ. Exadata customers have to use the latest Enterprise Edition of Oracle Database, version 11.2 or higher, and the system can’t be modified in any way.

Customers also can’t run any other software on the machines, he noted. “They didn’t really talk about whether you can do OLTP and data warehousing at the same time,” Olds said. “As these machines get bigger and bigger, there are fewer and fewer customers that can use them for just one workload.”

In some ways the event was notable for what Ellison did not say. With Sun customers facing uncertainty about the future of their platforms, rivals HP and IBM have been courting Sun customers away with aggressive migration programs. Oracle has been trying to contain the damage with newspaper ads saying it will invest more in Sun’s Sparc than Sun does.

But Ellison said nothing about his plans for Sun on Tuesday. He and Fowler both stressed that the Exadata 2 was developed under the companies’ long-standing partnership. The webcast ended abruptly with no time for questions.

Oracle has won approval for its Sun acquisition from U.S. regulators, but the European Commission has held up the deal, possibly until January. The Commission says it’s concerned that Oracle’s ownership of Sun’s MySQL database could harm competition in the open-source software market.

While most analysts expect the deal to go through, the uncertainty has been hammering Sun’s server business. Its server revenue plunged 37 percent in the second quarter, a much greater decline than for any of its main rivals, according to IDC.

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By Mikael Ricknäs
IDG News Service (Stockholm Bureau)
September 15, 2009

STOCKHOLM - Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems is being closely scrutinized by European Union regulatory authorities, but that isn’t stopping the companies from making their first joint announcement since the deal was announced in April.

The vendors this week are providing details on what they describe as the world’s first OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) database machine with Sun FlashFire technology. Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison and Sun’s John Fowler, executive vice president for Systems, will announce the product during a webcast Tuesday, according to an invite on the vendors’ Web sites posted over the weekend.

The registration form for the webcast is illustrated with a picture of an Exadata system, a core member of Exadata Storage Server and Database Machine family of products announced last September. Oracle called the product series, developed with Hewlett-Packard, its first line of hardware products. The series consists of preconfigured server racks including Oracle software and HP ProLiant servers that are designed to provide very high performance for data warehousing applications.

Recently, Oracle has stepped up the rhetoric when it comes to its plans for Sun. Last week, in a message to Sun customers, the company said it would “dramatically improve Sun’s hardware performance by tightly integrating Oracle software and Sun hardware.”

Oracle also, at the beginning of the month, put out a teaser ad for its OpenWorld conference in October with the headline “Sun+Oracle is Faster,” saying it plans to offer “proof” at the show.

Integration between Oracle’s software and Sun’s hardware is the most apparent synergy between the companies, said Per Sedihn, CTO at Swedish storage consultant Proact. Buying both software and hardware from one vendor should, in theory, result in lower integration costs, since everything comes prepackaged, according to Sedihn. But users also can get locked in to one vendor, he said.

“There isn’t an easy solution; you have to weigh the pros and cons in every separate case,” said Sedihn.

The merger between Sun and Oracle still hasn’t closed. The deal hit a setback when the European Commission opened an in-depth investigation into the planned US$7.4 billion takeover, citing “serious concerns” about the acquisition’s effect on competition in the database market. The Commission has until Jan. 19, 2010 to reach a decision.

The Commission wants to protect competition, but might end up doing the opposite by delaying the deal, according to Valdis Filks, research director at Gartner. The uncertainty of what will happen gives, for example, HP and IBM the opportunity to solidify a duopoly in the high-end server space, he said.

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” said Filks.

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By Patrick Thibodeau
Computerworld (US)
September 8, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - Continued delays in the completion of Oracle Corp.’s pending $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc. have put the latter into a limbo that appears to be devastating its computer server business.

The acquisition hit another major roadblock late last week when the European Commission announced that it is launching an in-depth investigation into the proposed deal based on what it called “serious concerns” about how the merger could affect competition in the database market.

US regulators approved the deal last month.

The EC disclosed its latest investigation just days after research firm IDC released a report showing that Sun’s second-quarter server revenue plunged by 37% to $981 million, the worst percentage drop of the major server vendors.

Analysts noted that IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co. and other computer manufacturers have aggressively courted Sun customers, offering them migration incentives and other deals that seek to take advantage of the uncertainty surrounding the Oracle deal.

IBM and HP also saw sales decline in the second quarter, but their shortfalls weren’t as precipitous as Sun’s. IBM’s sales dropped by 26% and HP’s by about 30%, according to IDC.

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Computerworld Philippines Staff
September 4, 2009

Oracle® Database 11g Release 2, a steady improvement from its predecessor, is now available for download, the IT solutions provider announced Thursday.

The new release, touted to bring better information delivery through the enterprise, includes the Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) functionality which delivers grid plug and play and new server pooling capabilities that enable organizations to reduce their server costs by streamlining the provisioning and management of consolidated database grids.

The IT vendor said the new release is coupled with an advanced compression and partitioning support, which could help compress data by twice to four times as much, lowering storage costs in the process.

“Our customers want features that offer better performance and availability, lower IT costs and ways to deliver better information to their business users,” said Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Database Server Technologies, Oracle. “The availability of Release 2 completes the vision of Oracle Database 11g to address today’s business and IT challenges.”

Oracle said the new release can deliver up to ten times faster query performance when coupled with the Oracle Database Machine, and also includes the capability to transparently execute a query against data stored in memory across all the servers in a grid.

“As organizations face exponential information growth and complexity throughout the data center, they are seeking to minimize IT costs and increase administrative efficiencies,” said Carl Olofson, Research Vice President, IDC. “Oracle Database 11g Release 2 features enhancements to grid computing, storage management and administration capabilities that are designed to help users achieve greater resource utilization of their information management systems while making the related system infrastructure and storage easier to manage and more affordable.”

The new database release is available for download at the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). – John Mark V. Tuazon

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By Anne Ozzimo

As the economic slowdown intensifies, executives are looking for ways to cut costs and IT budgets are under the microscope. More than 60% of CIOs are cutting back on short-term technology spending and postponing long-term plans, according to a recent survey by the US-based CIO Executive Board. IT budgets in the US are predicted to grow by only 2.3% in 2009, instead of the 5.8% growth originally forecast.

The economic crisis provides an opportunity for organizations to create leaner, more efficient operations, because circumstances demand that companies transform themselves to survive tough times. Oracle took this approach during the last downturn, consolidating and simplifying its IT infrastructure, and standardizing business processes worldwide. As a result, Oracle created a stronger platform to support future acquisitions and organic growth, and doubled its operating margins in the process.

US-based energy company Exelon understands the importance of investing in IT during a downturn. Last year, it kicked off a project to deploy an integrated Oracle platform to eliminate fragmented and manual planning and reporting processes and better manage its investments in tackling climate change. Despite the volatility of natural gas prices and the credit crunch in the US, the company remains committed to the project due to its strategic importance. “We can’t afford to stop investing in initiatives, like our finance transformation program, that will help us navigate through volatile business cycles, make prudent investments in our operations, and return value to investors,” explains Exelon Senior Vice President and CIO Daniel Hill.

Take IT Costs Out of the Business

Rather than slashing IT programs across the board, CIOs should consider reducing complexity to take costs out of the business, and focusing on innovative IT projects that deliver a fast return on investment (ROI). The key is to lay out a multiyear IT roadmap with both goals in mind, then identify areas where you can make progress very quickly, maybe in six or nine months. Ed Abbo, senior vice president of applications development at Oracle, says many IT departments have cut costs by reducing the number of applications across the business. Oracle Application Integration Architecture, a common object framework that lets companies create processes unique to their business, is designed to attack the kind of IT complexity that is plaguing most customers today.

One company that is taking advantage of this framework is Rackable Systems, a US-based provider of customized storage and server systems. The company deployed Oracle E-Business Suite 11i to support its business operations but did not have an effective CRM tool for managing leads, opportunities, and sales forecasts. The company purchased Oracle CRM On Demand and used Oracle AIA Process Integration Packs (PIPs), to link the software to Oracle E-Business Suite in three months.

Rackable’s new CRM OnDemand solution automatically synchronizes account information and associates opportunities with related quotes in Oracle E-Business Suite. End users need only sign on to the CRM service, and are able to see customer and product data directly through the interface. Nucleus Research estimates that the company achieved a 330% ROI on the implementation in just 5.3 months.

Innovate with high-impact, high-ROI projects

During a recent interview with BusinessWeek, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said: “There is no bad time to innovate. You should be doing it when times are good and when times are tough, and you want to be doing it around things that your customers care about.”

Bezos wasn’t just talking about investing in big innovations; he was highlighting technologies that can drive small, innovative changes in processes designed to delight customers, reduce overheads, and drive revenues. In fact, CIO Executive Board research found that companies that excelled through the last downturn reserved at least 5% of their IT spending for innovation.

In September 2008, global management consultancy McKinsey & Co identified four areas where technology investments can make a substantial impact. The first was developing systems that provide insights into customer segments and improve pricing discipline without increasing prices. Second was rethinking supply chains and logistics to improve delivery scheduling and inventory management. Third was enhancing support processes such as call centers to improve customer satisfaction, and the last was sharpening awareness of risk exposure and improving decision-making and performance management processes.

According to Oracle’s Abbo, customers must reinvent their processes in response to market dynamics during the downturn. “For example, a manufacturer might want to rethink the way it designs, manufactures, and distributes products in response to slower demand, greater pricing pressures, or more volatile supply chains,” he says.

Ultimately, organizations need to invest in technology projects that reinvent their business processes if they are to survive and thrive in any conditions. By investing in technology initiatives that will help them navigate through these volatile times, they will position themselves for even greater success when better times return.

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