The survey, conducted by research firm TheInfoPro in June, also asked IT managers from which vendors they were most likely to switch. Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and Sun Microsystems, which was acquired by Oracle in 2009, took the top spots.

For the second year, results showed Oracle struggling, TheInfoPro said in a statement. Asked how difficult it would be to switch vendors, 21% of the IT managers surveyed said it would be hard to replace Oracle, while 43% said it would be easy, and 35% said it would be “somewhat difficult.” For IBM , 36% said it would be hard, 23% said it would be easy and 41% said somewhat difficult. For HP , 41% said it would be hard, 26% said it would be easy, and 33% said it would be somewhat difficult.

In other areas, equipment from Hewlett-Packard and IBM was seen as highly replaceable, according to InfoPro, which also conducted hour-long interviews with the participants. Respondents said EMC or Hitachi Data Systems would be the most likely candidates to replace their IBM equipment, Coulter said, adding 29% of IBM customers surveyed said they’re planning to spend less this year than in 2009, he said.

“From narratives we read from interviewees, it’s mainly about their storage,” said Marco Coulter, managing director of TheInfoPro’s storage and cloud sectors.

Among IT vendors, EMC remained the clear leader in respondent’s minds when it came to storage area networked (SAN) systems, and NetApp led the way with network-attached storage (NAS), Coulter said.

Five EMC products were listed as among the “most exciting” as was the company itself by the Fortune 1000 respondents. EMC was rated second most exciting by mid-sized enterprises, with NetApp as first. Many of EMC’s customers said they plan to spend more than $25 million with the company this year, InfoPro said in a statement.

In the category of data storage management software, CommVault came out ahead of Symantec, with 54% of CommVault customers indicating they will spend more on their products in 2010, compared with 28% of Symantec’s customers.

“They’re just sitting there taking away from Symantec. I think there’s a lot of frustration with Symantec,” he said. “This is only my personal opinion, but I think people have used Symantec over the years and seen backup as very difficult with them, while CommVault has a slightly easier way of solving the backup problem.

CommVault also received high scores for technical support, Coulter said, where Symantec got slightly weaker scores.

The survey also showed that 28% of respondents said their spending on data storage systems would be flat this year, while 42% said the same for 2011. For 2010, 30% of respondents said they plan to cut spending on storage, while 42% they expect to increase it.

“As we look at the storage market overall, there’s still growth in 2010 and 2011, but we do see the growth rate slowing down,” Coulter said. “Just keeping the lights on is becoming a growing narrative.”

For the first time, a category of spending titled “Just keeping the lights on” reached the number 10 spot in the “new initiatives” category in TheInfoPro’s survey.

The respondents, 165 of whom worked for Fortune 1000 companies and 113 for mid-sized enterprises, said that dealing with capacity growth was the number one pain point, followed by a lack of proper forecasting and reporting tools.

Many of the IT managers indicated that using thin provisioning, which allocates storage to applications on an “as-needed” basis, helped them to better use their storage capacity. They also said they were able to reduce backup array and tape drive capacity through the use of deduplication, Coulter said.

Coulter was quick to point out that primary deduplication, however, technology that removes duplicate data before it’s stored on disk storage systems, is still mostly unused by large organizations.

“At some point, once you’ve thinly provisioned everything and deduplicated everything, you can’t continue to store more data on the capacity you have. At some point, storage growth will pick up,” Coulter said.

The expected use of solid state drives (SSD) in storage arrays, saw a modest 2% to 3% growth rate among those surveyed.

As in previous TheInfoPro surveys, virtualization and cloud computing remain top of mind this year with 54% of respondents saying virtualization is changing roles and responsibilities, and one in four indicating they expect the majority of production to be virtualized by 2012. And, while 8% of enterprises use an external cloud for storage, 31% expect that by 2012 more than 25% of data services will be protected through the cloud.

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by John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
August 26, 2010

In a move solidifying what analysts predict as the ‘consumerization’ of IT, software giant Oracle introduced the next iteration of its BPM (business process management) middleware, which will bring social media-like tools to what is traditionally just process-based applications, an executive announced recently.

Oracle BPM Suite 11g, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, will integrate three core characteristics that will enable users to manage their business processes better: a user-centric design, a unified process foundation, and social BPM.

The social BPM component of the new release will “marry Web 2.0 technologies with the application,” bringing Wikis, instant messaging, and discussion group to the system “so users can better collaborate with each other,” said Edward Zou, vice president for product management, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Asia Pacific.

Zou said the reality in the BPM realm today is that most companies have horizontal processes that cut across the organization. “In that BPM perspective, firms need to get people working with each other. It is important to help siloed organizations work with each other more effectively,” he explained.

The Oracle executive added that throughout the BPM cycle, a lot of collaboration happen outside the application–through e-mail, chat, and social media. “As such, you lose visibility [of the detailed changes in the process],” Zou stressed.

“Oracle’s BPM Suite 11g allows users to see through the same repository, which then allows the participants to collaborate with each other even if they are looking at the same file from a different angle,” he added.

This gives business process managers a heightened visibility of the changes within the entire system, to be able to see where the fail points are. “This is critical in the banking sector, especially in managing operational risk,” Zou shared.

The new software release–in development for the past two and a half years–also gives agility to users, which is required when companies enter into mergers and acquisition deals, a common driver of BPM in the enterprise.

With the Oracle BPM Suite 11g in operation, users are also able to deliver quick changes to the business process. “At least 63% of our customers were able to deploy changes within six months,” Zou noted.

Critical to deploying these changes, however, are the users who will eventually own the business processes. “It’s not just the system. You are changing the way people do their work, so change management is important.”

Zou added that in doing BPM, it is best to start with a small group first before keeping it going beyond the test group.

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By Lucas Mearian
Computerworld (US)
August 25, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - Hewlett-Packard’s $1.6 billion offer today to purchase grid-storage vendor 3Par came as a surprise to many tech industry watchers, but it’s a smart move, both offensively and defensively.

HP does not have its own enterprise-class storage array; instead — like Oracle/Sun — it resells Hitachi Data Systems’ Universal Storage Platform (USP). And it sees Dell — which offered $1.15 billion for 3Par a week ago — as a threat in the enterprise data center marketplace. 3Par’s cloud-based storage architecture would give it a significant leg up into that space.

HP’s chief strategy and technology officer, Shane Robison, argued that HP would be a better fit for Fremont, Calif.-based 3Par than Dell, since both HP and 3Par are Silicon Valley companies.

HP had been eying 3Par for some time and had made an earlier offer for the grid-storage vendor, HP executives said, though they did not provide further details.

3Par declined comment on HP’s bid. So did a Dell spokesman.

“Clearly, when you go in with a bid that’s a 33.3% premium [over a rival's bid] it’s a competitive bid and not based on what the company is worth,” said Mark Peters, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Mass. “So it’s going to end up with who blinks first. Which company wants to lose this bidding war less?”

3Par’s technologies will help HP expand its offerings for building public and private cloud services, according to Dave Donatelli, HP’s executive vice president and general manager of enterprise servers, storage and networking.

In addition, HP has “a unique ability” to bring 3Par’s products to market. “Our reach is something other [companies] simply can’t match,” he said during a morning conference call.

A gut punch to EMC

Donatelli once ran EMC’s Storage Division. He left EMC and moved to HP in April 2009.

In more ways than one, HP’s move reflects a worst-case scenario for EMC, which last year was able to obtain a court order blocking Donatelli from openly working in HP’s storage division for one year under the terms of a noncompete agreement he signed with EMC. Now, however, Donatelli and HP have an opportunity to make a land-grab for technology that competes directly against EMC’s high-end Symmetrix array.

“No question in my mind that Donatelli is a technology-hungry guy. Probably from the day he walked into HP, he made it known he was not crazy about reselling arrays from HDS,” said Arun Taneja, lead consultant at Taneja Group in Hopkinton, Mass.

The HP-Dell bidding war is reminiscent of EMC’s 2009 battle with rival NetApp for leading data de-duplication vendor Data Domain. NetApp bid first, but EMC eventually won the war in July 2009 by offering $2.1 billion in cash for a company that generated $274 million in revenue in 2008.

While Data Domain’s board of directors urged the company to reject EMC’s bid, ultimately they accepted the bigger offer.

3Par reported $194.3 million in revenue for the fiscal year that ended March 31. So HP’s bid already represents a valuation that’s more than eight times the revenue 3Par generates. Even so, analysts don’t think the bidding war will end quickly; they expect a counter offer by Dell.

Both HP and Dell have deep pockets. Dell reported earnings of $52 billion in its last fiscal year. HP earned $114 billion.

“It would be very odd for someone to back down soon,” Peters said.

What’s in it for Dell?

Dell has been acquiring companies in the storage arena for the past two years. It bought out iSCSI storage company EqualLogic in 2008, network-attached storage provider Exanet in February and data compression vendor Ocarina Networks last month as part of a strategy to gather best-in-class storage products.

3Par sells storage arrays that can be clustered together to provide petabytes of capacity that can be served up to business units like a utility. The technology is especially well suited for supporting virtualized server setups and private and public cloud computing infrastructures because it can be centrally managed and scales, like building blocks, in capacity and performance.

So if Dell purchases 3Par, it gets a strong foundation on which it can build a cloud computing offering.

“Dell’s bid was always and still remains about more than just storage,” Peters said. “Dell wants to be more of an enterprise player in the data center, and this is part of a jigsaw piece in that puzzle.”

Taneja said that while HP may appear to be the better suitor for 3Par because of its longer history with storage in the enterprise data center, Dell has proven it knows how to handle storage acquisitions. For example, since Dell’s acquisition of EqualLogic, the iSCSI storage company has seen a 63% year-over-year increase in revenue, according to Taneja.

“At the time Dell was purchasing EqualLogic, everyone was saying, ‘What does Dell think it’s doing?’ All of EqualLogic’s resellers will disappear,” Taneja said. “Man, how wrong was that?”

What about EMC, IBM - even Oracle?

Industry analysts agreed that other data center and storage players, such as IBM, EMC and even Oracle, won’t likely enter the fray between Dell and HP. For one, IBM and EMC already have their own enterprise-class storage arrays, so purchasing another array company would practically be an admission that their existing technology is lacking.

Oracle is still busy digesting its purchase of Sun Microsystems, which currently resells HDS’ high-end arrays and offers entry-level systems from LSI Logic midrange systems of its own. So it’s also not a likely suitor, both Taneja and Peters said.

“Oracle would be a horrible place for 3Par,” Taneja said. “Look at what they’re doing with Sun. They’re quashing all the openness. Customers were already leaving Sun. In the hands of Oracle, that has accelerated.”

Peters agreed: “I think the others will stand on the side and say, ‘Let them fight it out.’”

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By Paul Krill
InfoWorld (US)
August 25, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Next month’s revamped JavaOne conference, the first under Oracle’s jurisdiction, will feature a keynote presentation from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, as well as the latest on Java technologies ranging from the GlassFish application server to the JavaFX rich media platform.

Ellison will take the stage Sept. 20 in San Francisco to discuss Oracle’s vision and strategy for Java, Oracle said.

[ Oracle's lawsuit over the use of Java in Android has left some developers unhappy. | Keep up with app dev issues and trends with InfoWorld's Fatal Exception blog and Developer World newsletter. ]

“In this opening JavaOne keynote, Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO, and Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s executive vice president, product development, share Oracle’s vision for strengthened investment and innovation in Java and describe how Java will continue to grow as the most powerful, scalable, secure, and open platform for the global developer community,” Oracle said on its JavaOne conference website.

Oracle later in the week will cover “the Java frontier” in a presentation featuring speakers such as Mark Reinhold, chief architect in the Java Platform Group.

“The world of Java has never wavered in its trajectory of relentless innovation. In this keynote, Java luminaries from Oracle map out the rapidly evolving Java landscape and then host demonstrations representing some of the most exciting and valuable uses of Java across a diversity of domains,” the website says.

But this year’s conference is likely to feature more than what can be gleaned from the sessions list, analyst Al Hilwa, of IDC, said.

“For example, I expect significant attention given to Java fragmentation and how Oracle plans to avoid it in the future. Oracle is also likely to play up its considerable contributions to open source and community developed software to highlight its credibility in this area. I suspect there will be quite a bit of discussion around Java governance issues and how parallel implementations of Java can get certified,” Hilwa said.

Oracle has gotten a bad rap with some in the open source community in the wake of its recent lawsuit against Google over the Android platform and its use of Java, Hilwa said.

JavaOne features a session about testing for the Google App Engine cloud platform — a bit ironic since Oracle is suing Google.

Also to be covered at the conference will be Project Lambda. The project is an OpenJDK (Java Development Kit) effort exploring Java language features intended to increase developer productivity when working with parallel APIs such as Fork/Join Framework.

Other topics of note include the Hudson open source integration server, the Groovy scripting language for the Java Virtual Machine, Java Standard Edition 7 and the HotSpot Java Virtual Machine. Project Jigsaw, offering a module system for Java, will be covered as well.

JavaOne has been an annual event to cover all things Java. When Java was owned by Sun Microsystems, JavaOne would be held around early June as a separate conference in San Francisco. Now that Oracle has acquired Sun, the event is being held concurrently with the Oracle OpenWorld and Oracle Develop conferences.

It appears, however that James Gosling, considered the father of Java and a staple at previous JavaOne conferences, will not appear this year. Searches on his name on the JavaOne site have come up empty.

Oracle Develop, meanwhile, will focus on numerous development technologies, including the WebLogic Server application server and Microsoft .Net, while OpenWorld covers Oracle technologies including the company’s database, applications, and Fusion middleware.

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By James Niccolai
IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)
August 18, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - IBM has strengthened its hand in the Unix business with new systems based on its Power7 processors, including a server for large enterprises that scales to 256 cores.

The Power 795 is IBM’s biggest Unix server to date. It’s aimed at companies that run large-scale database applications or want to consolidate multiple Unix or Linux workloads onto a single system using IBM’s PowerVM virtualization software.

IBM also launched several low-end Power7-based servers, each with one or two processors. Combined with the mid-range systems it launched earlier this year, the new servers round out IBM’s Power7 line-up from top to bottom.

All the new systems are offered with Linux or IBM’s AIX or i operating systems (i is the new name for IBM’s i5/OS). They’ll compete with Unix servers from Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, which acquired Sun’s hardware business when it bought the company earlier this year.

Few organizations need a box as big as the 795 to run a single, large application, and IBM expects most customers to use it for consolidation projects, which can help reduce energy use and conserve data center floor space, said Steve Sibley, IBM’s worldwide marketing manager for Power systems.

The box can be carved into 254 partitions today, and IBM has said it will increase that number to 1,000 next year when it completes the required testing. “You may need a firmware update to do that, but right now we don’t anticipate customers having to do anything,” Sibley said.

The 795 has 8TB of main memory and uses eight processor “books,” as IBM calls them, each with four Power7 processors. The chips each have eight processor cores, up from two on the Power6, and IBM says the new processors are compatible with Power6-based servers. That means customers can slide Power7 books into an existing Power 695 chassis without any other upgrades required, Sibley said.

IBM is launching the systems into a soft market. Unix server sales have been in decline, with revenue dropping 22 percent between 2008 and 2009, to $13.1 billion, according to IDC. The analyst company expects the market to pick up slightly this year and next.

IBM has been doing better than its rivals in those poor conditions. It sold the most Unix gear in each of the last three years, according to IDC, expanding its share of revenue to 40.3 percent in 2009, compared to 26.2 percent for HP and 25.3 percent for Sun.

The new systems could strengthen its position further. “On a hardware basis, it’s pretty clear IBM is in the lead in raw performance,” according to Dan Olds, principal analyst at Gabriel Consulting.

Still, IBM’s growth came in a period of turmoil for its rivals, said IDC analyst Jean Bozman. HP has been transitioning customers from its PA-RISC chip to Intel’s Itanium processor, and Sun’s future was clouded for a long time during talk of an acquisition.

After some delays, HP has now launched new servers based on Itanium 2, and Oracle is finally discussing a road map for Sun’s hardware business. That puts them in a better position competitively. Still, Bozman said, “IBM is in a very strong position.”

Even IBM doesn’t know exactly how customers will respond to the 256-core system. ‘This is the first time we’ve gone from 64 cores to 256, so it will be interesting to see the demand,” Sibley said. A handful of customers have applications that are large enough to run across a entire system, “but we do see hundreds of partitions being the norm,” he said.

The company offers a “capacity on demand” payment model, so customers can order a fully loaded system and pay for the processors as they are activated.

IBM didn’t provide a price for the 795, except to say it starts at $500,000. Sibley said customers end up getting about twice the number of processor cores on a Power7 system as they would for a Power 6 system of the same price.

For low-end servers, IBM disables some of the Power7 cores to offer four- and six-core chips. Those processors are offered in the Power 710, 720, 730 and 740 systems, which were also launched Tuesday in one- and two-socket rackmount and tower formats. The servers start from $6,385, Sibley said.

The company also launched a new Smart Analytics system, the 7600, which comes preinstalled with IBM’s DB2 data warehousing software on a system built for data analytics. It’s the Power7 upgrade of a Power 6 system IBM launched in April.

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By Fred O’Connor
IDG News Service (Boston Bureau)
August 17, 2010

BOSTON - The reign of Hewlett-Packard’s former CEO Mark Hurd was bookended by scandal — only where the first one, in which the HP board was caught spying on journalists and others, allowed Hurd to consolidate power and nab the chairman’s job, the second has sent him packing. Meanwhile, Oracle has sued Google, claiming that the Android mobile OS infringes on patents it acquired from Sun Microsystems.

1. Actress in HP scandal sorry Hurd lost his job: The actress who brought sexual harassment charges against former Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd said she was surprised that the allegations cost him his job. Jodie Fisher, an actress and reality television contestant, released a statement on Sunday in which she came out as the person who brought the claims against Hurd. Fisher worked for HP as a contractor and attended executive summits and major client meetings. Late last Friday HP announced that Hurd had resigned from the company, saying that he did not violate HP’s sexual harassment policy but did violate its standards of business conduct. Hurd filed inaccurate expense reports to conceal his personal, nonsexual relationship with Fisher and paid her for work she did not perform, according to statements from HP.

2. Google, Verizon make net neutrality proposal: Last week’s rumors of network neutrality talks between Google and Verizon turned out to be true. But contrary to media reports, neither company wants to create a business arrangement. Instead, Google and Verizon on Monday released a proposal that would allow the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to enforce some network neutrality rules. The proposal would bar ISPs (Internet service providers) from blocking or slowing Internet traffic and allow the FCC to fine offenders up to US$2 million. Network neutrality fans knocked the proposal, saying the measure does nothing to keep the Web open and is ineffective since it does not cover wireless broadband.

3. Oracle sues Google over Java use in Android: Google’s Android mobile-phone OS infringes on Oracle’s Java software patents, according to a lawsuit that Oracle filed against the search company. Oracle’s lawsuit claims that Google knowingly infringed its Java technology, which Oracle acquired when it bought Sun. An analyst said that Google developed Android without using Sun technology and that the success of Android phones served as a catalyst for the lawsuit.

4. Microsoft’s 30-day forecast: Stormy exploits expected: IT administrators may want to rethink summer holiday plans after Microsoft issued its monthly security update on Tuesday. Of the 32 flaws that Microsoft rated on how likely they are to be exploited, 18 of them were labeled as very likely to be exploited. Popular Microsoft products like Office 2007, Internet Explorer, Silverlight and Windows all received patches.

5. Skype files IPO registration with SEC: Internet telephony company Skype looks to raise $100 million through an initial public offering, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company, formerly part of online retailer eBay after an acquisition, will use the funds for “general business purposes” and to grow its user base.

6. New Android malware texts premium-rate numbers: Kaspersky Lab researchers discovered the first malware program that targets the Android mobile OS. The application presents itself as a media player but sends text messages to the number of the hacker who created the software. However, Android phone owners outside of Russia don’t need to fret over their phones’ security just yet. The application isn’t available in the Android Market, and so far the program has only appeared on phones sold in Russia and on mobile networks in that country.

7. Dell’s Streak tablet to go on sale Aug. 12: Dell’s Streak, a device that the company describes as a tablet PC but has smartphone features, will be available to U.S. consumers on Friday. The device is already available in the U.K. Dell says the device’s 5-inch screen will offer better multimedia experiences than smartphones with smaller screens.

8. Twitter launches the Tweet Button: Twitter launched the Tweet Button, which aims to ease the process of posting Web links to the social media site. By installing the button on their sites, Web publishers will allow users to share URLs without leaving the page or switching browser tabs. Clicking the Tweet Button launches a pop-up window that allows users to access their Twitter accounts, presents a shortened URL and permits people to post the information to their accounts.

9. AT&T, Verizon cashing in outside of phones: Data services are contributing more to the bottom line of U.S. mobile carriers thanks to the rash of e-readers, tablet PCs and other consumer electronics devices on the market. In the second quarter U.S. mobile penetration exceeded 100 percent, according to an industry consultant. The increase of iPads, Kindles and other non-phone devices connecting to data networks helped U.S. mobile operators earn 31 percent of their second-quarter revenue from mobile data services.

10. Oracle provides Sparc road map, but questions remain: Oracle this week also discussed plans for another piece of technology it acquired from Sun. Oracle described the five-year plan for updating the processors in its Sparc-based server line. Oracle offered details on the servers to counter customer concerns that it was abandoning their development. Oracle also has plans for Sun’s Solaris OS and will ship Solaris 11, the software’s next major update, in 2011. However, questions remain over the fate of both lines of Sparc processors since only plans for the overall chip family were discussed.

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By James Niccolai
IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)
August 17, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Oracle appeared to confirm this week what many in the computer industry already suspected: The OpenSolaris project is dead.

Oracle laid out its Solaris strategy in an internal memo that was leaked to the OpenSolaris mailing list on Friday. It says Oracle’s efforts are focused on a commercial Solaris release that will help expand the sale of its servers and other products.

“All of Oracle’s efforts on binary distributions of Solaris technology will be focused on Solaris 11,” the memo states. “We will not release any other binary distributions, such as nightly or bi-weekly builds of Solaris binaries, or an OpenSolaris 2010.05 or later distribution.”

Solaris 11 is the next major update to the Solaris operating system, which Oracle has said will be released next year.

Oracle will release a free developer edition of Solaris 11 later this year, called Solaris 11 Express, which will come with an optional support plan, the memo says. It hopes to persuade companies using OpenSolaris today to switch to Solaris 11 Express, and presumably to Solaris 11 in the future.

A spokesman for Oracle said the company declined to comment.

Doubts had already surfaced about Oracle’s commitment to OpenSolaris, an open-source version of the Solaris OS that Sun released in a bid to attract more developers — and eventually, it hoped, more paying customers — to its products. Oracle assumed control of Solaris when it closed its acquisition of Sun in January.

Last month The OpenSolaris Governing Board threatened to disband unless Oracle appointed a liaison to discuss its future plans for the OS.

Not surprisingly, developers who contributed to the project were dismayed at the latest development.

“This is a terrible send-off for countless hours of work — for quality software which will now ship as an Oracle product that we (the original authors) can no longer obtain on an unrestricted basis,” wrote Steven Stallion, a software engineer in Atlanta who contributed to the project, in his blog.

“I can only maintain that the software we worked on was for the betterment of all, not for any one company’s bottom line. This is truly a perversion of the open source spirit,” he wrote.

Explaining its strategy, Oracle says in the memo that it “can’t do everything. The limiting factor is our engineering bandwidth measured in people and time. So we have to ensure our top priority is driving delivery of the #1 Enterprise Operating System, Solaris 11, to grow our systems business.”

It also implied that OpenSolaris compromised its competitive position. “We want the adoption of our technology and intellectual property to accelerate our overall goals, yet not permit competitors to derive business advantage (or FUD) from our innovations before we do,” it wrote.

The company will “continue to grow a vibrant developer and system administrator community for Solaris” and contribute code to projects like Apache and Perl, it said. Solaris code already released under Sun’s open-source CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License) will keep the same license, it said.

It’s the second example this week of how Oracle’s strategy differs markedly from that of Sun, and also the second time that Oracle has miffed the open-source community.

On Thursday Oracle said it had filed a lawsuit against Google, charging that its open-source Android phone software violated Oracle patents and copyrights related to Java, another technology it inherited from Sun.

That move also drew the ire of some open-source advocates. Software developer and political lobbyist Florian Mueller called it “an assertion of patents against free and open source software.”

Google called it a “baseless attack” against “the open source Java community” and vowed to fight Oracle’s claims.

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By Patrick Thibodeau
Computerworld (US)
August 13, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - Analysts are developing a short list of possible candidates to replace former Hewlett-Packard Co. CEO Mark Hurd, who resigned Friday. But it’s worth noting that Hurd’s name didn’t come up often, if at all, as a contender in 2005, when he was tapped for the HP job.

At the time, he was a veteran of NCR Corp., where he had served as its CEO and president.

During that search, The Wall Street Journal said executive recruiters envisioned the ideal successor to be “a star CEO at a company with at least $40 billion in annual sales.” NCR had revenue totaling just over $6 billon, making Hurd something of a surprise choice.

With Hurd now out — he resigned after HP’s board found fault with his relationship with a contractor and related expense reports filings , the succession guessing game is in full swing. Analysts are brushing off their 2005 lists and some familiar names are emerging as hot prospects.

Among those mentioned, once again, is Michael Capellas, the former CEO of Compaq, and Joseph Tucci, the CEO of EMC . The names of executives at IBM , Microsoft and Oracle are also being bandied about.
HP executives who were likely considered in 2005 and are seen as contenders now include Ann Livermore, the executive vice president of the company’s enterprise business and Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president of HP’s imaging and printing group. New to the list is Todd Bradley, a former Palm CEO and president who is now executive vice president of HP’s personal systems group.

An easier task, perhaps, than trying to guess names is to determine what type of management style HP’s board will want in its next CEO.

Chuck House, an HP veteran who now heads Stanford University’s Media X , was especially critical of Hurd’s management style in his blog . He outlined in an e-mail what he hopes the board will look for in Hurd’s replacement. (Media X is affiliated with the H-STAR Institute (Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute) at Stanford, and works with industry and academics to study the impact of information and technology on society.)

House hopes the new CEO is someone who is “innovation appreciative” and is willing to spend research and development dollars, a leader who employs “management by walking around…, which implies caring and compassion and regard with dignity for employees.”

House also believes that HP needs to change its employee reward system by “getting rid of huge bonuses for the few, and restoration of profit sharing and much smaller, but meaningful, stock options for the many,” he said. “This is an easy signal to implement, and relatively cheap to do in actuality,” he said.

House, co-author of The HP Phenomenon: Innovation and Business Transformation, added that HP needs a listener and a supporter of “collective intelligence” rather than “father-knows-best” management style, he said.

Rob Enderle, an independent analyst in San Jose, Calif., said any internal candidates at HP could have an edge.

“This time around they have internal candidates that could do the job, though external candidates with the needed breadth will be rare,” said Enderle. He noted the emergence of board director Mark Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape who has launched other companies and is a venture capitalist, “as a power player” at HP.

Andreessen “may want to put someone vastly younger and more dynamic in the role than any of the traditional internal or external candidates,” Enderle said. “I think the odds favor either an internal candidate or an unanticipated candidate at the moment, depending on how quickly they need to fill the job and how much influence Andreessen actually does have.”

Another important area for the next CEO will be ethics. Hurd wasn’t directly involved in the company’s pretexting scandal in 2006, when HP acquired phone records under false pretenses to learn the identity of a leaker. That incident prompted HP to emphasize its business conduct rules — rules that eventually led to Hurd’s ouster.

“I would expect the company to say publicly that it is strongly committed to ethics and internal compliance, and I imagine that whoever becomes CEO will also say publicly that she/he is strongly committed to ethics and internal compliance and quickly moving beyond this episode,” said Miriam Baer, assistant professor of law at Brooklyn Law School.

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Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation (RCBC), one of the Philippine’s top five largest private domestic banks, today announced the wide range deployment of Oracle solutions.

The implementation of the Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12, Oracle Database 11g, and Oracle Fusion Middleware will provide RCBC best-in-class and reliable technology tools to effectively manage complex business operations, streamline processes, enhance decision-making, support growth, and lower IT cost.

After assessing its primary requirements and evaluating solutions available in the market, RCBC believed that the rich functionalities offered by the Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 will help manage the complexities of the global business environments. The key modules that will be deployed include the Oracle E-Business Suite Financials, Oracle Internet Expenses, Oracle iProcurement, Oracle Purchasing and Oracle Inventory Management. With the Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12, RCBC expects improved efficiencies in key business functions including finance, travel spend management, purchasing, inventory management, and procurement.

RCBC expects to take control of its rapid data growth, gain better insight and quickly adapt to its competitive environment with Oracle Database 11g. Oracle Database 11g delivers superior performance, scalability, availability, security and ease of management on a low-cost grid of industry standard storage and servers. Its unique ability to manage all data from traditional business information to XML and 3D spatial information makes it the ideal choice to power transaction processing, data warehousing, and content management applications.

RCBC will also benefit from Oracle Fusion Middleware products designed to work together and be hot-pluggable with existing application and technology investment. These products include Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition One and Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition.

Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition will provide RCBC’s IT infrastructure with a high performance ELT architecture. A component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition will meet RCBC’s data integration needs for data warehousing and business intelligence. In the future, RCBC intends to incorporate Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition into their enterprise information management initiatives to improve data quality and deploy data services in an SOA environment.

“RCBC recognizes the critical role of IT in the overall performance of the company. We are confident that with Oracle, we are investing in the right technology and working with the right partner,” said Dennis Bancod, Executive Vice President and Information Technology and Operations Group Head, RCBC. “By moving to Oracle, we expect to boost our operational productivity as well as our competitive advantage.”

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

Enterprise software firm Oracle recently released the new addition to its product value chain in the form of Oracle Agile Customer Needs Management (CNM), a collaborative application that enables users to capture and record ideas and customer feedback internally.

The new application will be part of Oracle’s product value chain solution, which currently includes Oracle Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Oracle Product Hub, Oracle’s AutoVue Enterprise Visualization, and Oracle Product Data Quality.

The new module will open up the product conceptualization process to other stakeholders of the company, not just the research and development division. “The solution complements current systems by being a central point where different vehicles of ideas can be collated and managed,” explained Hardeep Gulati, vice president for PLM, PIM product strategy, Oracle.

The CNM module can pull ideas, feedback, and requirements from a host of different sources—whether it be from the company’s support community, the support form of the website, the CRM application, or through specialized communities such as Facebook and online forums.

“The beauty of the application is that we have designed it to leverage tagging, group reviewing, comments, and an easy-to-use user interface for easier adoption,” Gulati noted.

Users can also link the ideas to a specific project that materialized in the PLM software “so you can track the entire process down, as well as the entire workflow,” he added.

Gulati likewise emphasized the integration of business intelligence elements into their Agile PLM software, which has been added to the offering a few years back. “If you look at the maturity rate of PLM products today, most are focused only on being able to manage product data, design information, and put all these into change control so that they can have accurate information,” he explained.

Gulati said customers have moved to a point where they not only want to manage, but also get insights from their PLM installations as well, in order to “make better decisions about their products, know what to invest on, see what new products to launch, know the quality aspects of their products, and discover which suppliers to get.”

With the recent versions of Oracle’s PLM solution, Gulati said they have continued to expand on its analytics capabilities. “We can now capture quality, see the root causes of issues, time it takes to give a resolution, map the customers’ questions and complaints, among others,” he emphasized.

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By Jaikumar Vijayan
Computerworld (US)
July 8, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - After three years in development, Oracle Corp.’s much-anticipated Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g (OBIEE) suite will be formally released at an event in London on Wednesday.

OBIEE 11g is being seen by many as one of the biggest updates that Oracle has made to its business intelligence (BI) platform for the past several years.

Oracle has revealed very little details on the product officially. In a blog post announcing its plans for the July 7 launch, the company touted the new BI suite as an “industry-leading” platform offering improved analytics, visualization, search, collaboration and system management capabilities.

It says OBIEE 11g will also offer an industry-leading innovation that lets companies tie its BI activities more closely to enterprise resource planning ( ERP ) systems.

Sparse details on the product have appeared elsewhere as well. In an interview with Database Trends and Applications , an executive with an Oracle partner described the new release as having closer integration with Oracle’s Fusion and Scorecard Applications, as well as with its Essbase Online Analytical Processing Server, which Oracle acquired with its purchase of Hyperion.

The new version is architected to be completely Web-based. It supports heterogeneous data sources and integrates well with relational, XML and, OLAP adapt sources, reports Database Trends and Applications.

Cintra Inc., a New York-based Oracle partner that appears to have been a beta tester, said in a blog post that the new BI suite features a “great look and feel.”

OBIEE 11g features a new Oracle graph rendering engine, improved report indexing and report search capabilities and features Hyperion’s Essbase as a performance accelerator for applications available with OBIEE 11g, Cintra said.

Users can expect to see Oracle’s OBIEE 11g incorporate technologies from the company’s acquisitions of Hyperion and Seibel, said Boris Evelson, an analyst with Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass.

“Oracle made two very significant acquisitions of Seibel and Hyperion. Between these two companies and Oracle’s own legacy BI tools, [Oracle] had three sets of different tools that did the same job,” Evelson said. “They’ve had to spend a lot of time to reconcile these technologies,” he said.

The launch tomorrow is going to be all about how the company is now a leader in the BI space now that its integration of the technologies is complete, Evelson said.

Oracle’s product announcement comes at a time when market interest in BI tools is soaring, Evelson said. “BI is front and center of the agenda for a lot of large vendors,” such as IBM , SAP , SAS and Oracle.

Given the interest surrounding BI tools, Evelson expects Oracle’s new product to be received favorably by customers. “There are a lot of features that close some of the gaps in their earlier versions and some new features that will leapfrog [over rivals],” he said.

Though Oracle will announce OBIEE 11g tomorrow, it is not immediately clear when the product will ship. The U.S release of the product is scheduled for July 20.

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By Paul Krill
InfoWorld (US)
July 1, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - James Gosling, the key developer of the Java platform while he was at now-defunct Sun Microsystems, said Tuesday that Oracle, which bought Sun earlier this year, has an excellent understanding of the server-side Java but is confused about what to do with Java on desktops and cell phones.

As the keeper of Sun’s prized Java technologies, Oracle has a lot of say in how Java proceeds. Gosling, who briefly worked at Oracle after the merger but ended up quitting in April, offered a mixed outlook for Oracle’s handling of Java when interviewed Tuesday at the Hadoop Summit 2010 conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

[ Gosling is among several former Sun technologists who did not stay with Oracle after the merger. See the InfoWorld report. | More from the Hadoop Summit: Yahoo adds security and workflow management to Hadoop ]

“The core VM on enterprise hardware, that’s the core of their business. They understand that,” Gosling said. “They will execute really well on that.

“Outside of that, when it comes to like the desktop stuff and the cell phone stuff, they find it very confusing,” said Gosling. He is often called the father of Java, which was introduced in 1995.

Oracle will do an excellent job with the core JVM for server-side Java, Gosling said. But the non-server side of Java is “kind of a strange world to them,” he said.

Java has had a strong presence on devices such as cell phones.

Oracle completed its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun in January and has expressed commitments to Sun-driven technologies such as Java. The company also sponsored a recent update to the NetBeans IDE, of which Gosling has been a big fan. That update introduced features for JavaFX, which in turn includes multimedia capabilities based on Java.

An Oracle representative Tuesday declined to respond to Gosling’s comments.

Currently, Gosling is taking a six- to eight-month break away from corporate life and is working on autonomous vehicle technology at Stanford University. An autonomous vehicle features a car without a driver. The Stanford project is Java-based, Gosling said.

“This one is actually a marketing stunt from a project that’s funded by VW. They’re trying to do the Pike’s Peak road rally in a car with no driver at superhuman speeds,” he said.

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By Paul Krill
InfoWorld (US)
June 22, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Cloudera and Quest Software are unveiling on Monday plans to build software to connect the popular Hadoop data management platform to Oracle databases.

Code-named “Ora-Oop,” the free software will accommodate users who need to link relational data in Oracle databases with the data handled in Hadoop, which serves as a large-scale storage and computation engine, said Michael Olson, Cloudera CEO.

[ See InfoWorld's report on Datameer's proposed simpler way for business analysts to use Hadoop. ]

“We see enormous interest in Hadoop at large enterprises,” Olson said. “They’re collecting more data from more places than ever before,” such as weblogs and user-generated content, he said.

Hadoop deals with structured and complex data, such as blogs, images, and documents that could not be easily put into a relational database, he said. Cloudera offers Hadoop-based software and services while Quest has provided third-party tools for Oracle.

“One of the issues we see when we talk to enterprise users is they already have substantial investments in Oracle,” Olson said. Enterprises may need to link such data as information about users, which is in a relational database, with information that users create, such as what searches they create, said Olson.

Ora-Oop will work with the Cloudera distribution of Apache Hadoop.

Ora-Oop is to feature an interface allowing bidirectional data transfer between Oracle databases and Hadoop. Ora-Oop will complement the Cloudera-authored Sqoop open source tool for importing data from relational databases to Hadoop. While Ora-Oop will provide high-connectivity throughput to Oracle databases based on Oracle primitives, Sqoop leverages generic SQL. Ora-Oop, though, will leverage the Sqoop framework.

Asked if Cloudera had plans to offer connectivity between Hadoop and other databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, Olson said the company had nothing to announce at the moment. But the company hopes to work on more projects with Quest, he said.

Ora-Oop will be available from both Cloudera Quest in the beginning of the fourth quarter of this year. Quest, meanwhile, will make the Cloudera Hadoop distribution available on the Quest Website.

Cloudera and Quest plan product bundling and joint commercial support for the Ora-Oop. Possible commercial products that could be built around Ora-Oop could be technology to report on data handled by Ora-Oop, according to Christian Hasker, director of product management at Quest.

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By Paul Krill
InfoWorld (US)
June 17, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - An effort to improve performance of managed runtime applications, based on technologies like Java and .Net, is being launched Tuesday by Azul Systems.

The company’s Managed Runtime Initiative is billed as a software development and integration initiative intended to improve execution of managed runtimes by enhancing interfaces and functionality across components of a systems stack. These components include the managed runtime, OS kernel, hypervisor, and hardware layer. The initiative covers multiple projects, some based on open source software.

“The central problems that we address have to do with things like consistency of performance, being able to effectively scale instances of these managed runtime applications like Java,” in order to take advantage of the physical memory of systems available today, said Scott Sellers, president and CEO of Azul.

Managed runtime environments have limits in terms of effectively taking advantage of the many CPU cores available now on commodity hardware, Sellers said. There also is an issue with scaling applications to take advantage of large memory configurations, he said.

“The fundamental limitation is actually deep down inside the virtual machine,” of the software platform, Sellers said.

The Managed Runtime Initiative takes a holistic approach to addressing scalability, according to Sellers. To start out the initiative, an initial contribution and reference implementation from Azul features an enhanced Java runtime, to serve as an enhanced version of OpenJDK 6 (Java Development Kit), and a set of loadable Linux kernel modules. These technologies are offered under the GNU General Public License 2. Azul will seek acceptance of these improvements by the Java and Linux communities; Java and Linux are not necessarily the only targets of the initiative, but are starting points.

“Instead of a couple of gigabytes of ‘processible’ memory, the reference implementation shows now how Java instances can scale to hundreds of gigabytes of memory,” said Sellers.

In its press statement, Azul cited an endorsement from Java founder James Gosling.

“I’m excited about the Managed Runtime Initiative and the contribution Azul is making to the open source community,” said Gosling, formerly of Oracle and Sun Microsystems. “Managed runtimes have come a long way since the mid-90s. However, the rest of the systems stack has not evolved to meet the needs of these now-pervasive application environments. This initiative will bring new functionality to the systems stack, freeing managed runtimes to continue their growth and evolution.”

Azul’s effort was called significant by Forrester analyst John Rymer.

“It might turn out to be a forcing function for Oracle and the Java community to start addressing the limited memory available to Java applications. It might result in creation of new technology to address those limitations. Either way, I think it is important,” Rymer said.

The issue is that Java Virtual Machines have a practical limit of 2GB of memory, a constraint set about 10 years ago, said Rymer. “Today, some apps strain at this limitation and  I expect the number of apps in this category to grow in response to business requirements and availability of huge memory pools in new hardware,” he explained.

Azul is not yet ready to announce any partners it might have on the initiative but will approach vendors who could be critical to the effort, such as Oracle, which now maintains Java technologies developed by Sun Microsystems. Other platforms, such as .Net and Ruby, also could benefit. Linux players will be approached as well.

Azul has found interest in the effort from Microsoft, Sellers said. But this interest does not necessarily mean Microsoft’s active support, he stressed.

The technology forming the basis of the initiative was developed by Azul, which has specialized in hardware appliances to speed up Java performance. With its new direction, Azul could conceivably branch out into the software business, Sellers explained.

Oracle, Microsoft, and the Linux Foundation were not able to provide any comment on the initiative as of Monday afternoon.

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By Computerworld Philippines Staff
May 7, 2010

Local power firm Visayan Electric Company, Inc. (VECO) went live recently with the Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing (CC&B) technology to achieve accurate reporting and faster response to regulatory requirements.

Bong Borja, assistant vice president, Information Services, Power Distribution Group, AboitizPower, described the CC&B as a highly configurable solution that helps VECO to manage all aspects of customer information and billing. VECO is a subsidiary of AboitizPower.

In photo are, from left: Peter Yates, project director, Oracle Utilities Consulting; Bien Garcia, VP - Admin , DLPC; Stephen Antig, project manager, Oracle Consulting; Jaime Jose Aboitiz, EVP and COO, AboitizPower; Joaquin Arambulo, country practice director, Oracle Consulting; Ben Arkoncel, AVP - Customer Services Group, VECO; Lito Masion, AVP - Information Services Group, VECO; and Bong Borja, project director, AVP - Information Services, Power Distribution Group, AboitizPower.

“With the help of Oracle Consulting, we now have the application we need to improve service delivery across all our DUs and to help us to compete more effectively,” Borja said, adding that his company AboitizPower has seven power distribution utilities, as well as 1,971 MW of installed generation capacity located throughout the Philippines.

According to Oracle, the CC&B is designed to deliver efficiency in processing customers’ requests for services, such as power connection, change of ownership, temporary disconnection, reconnection, billing adjustments and service retirement.  It also enables the utility to respond quickly to emergencies and customer complaints, as well as efficiently maintain customer records, integrate data for easier reconciliation, provide on-time and accurate billing and comply with changes in the power rate structure.

The application interfaces with Oracle Financials and business intelligence applications.

Oracle reported the implementation of CC&B at VECO provides AboitizPower with a standard, integrated and unified solution for its entire power distribution business. The solution will be rolled out to the other subsidiaries, starting with Davao Light and Power Company (DLPC).

“Around the world, utilities are under pressure to address customer demands, improve environmental quality and comply with regulatory requirements.  Oracle Utilities provides a choice of mission-critical applications to deliver tangible business results.  Our recent traction in the industry illustrates the solid value we bring to our customers,” said Jo-Anne Ruhl, vice president and general manager APAC, Oracle Utilities. – Tom S. Noda

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
May 5, 2010

A better way of providing visibility through integrated data forecasting has been re-introduced to software firm Oracle’s CRM On-Demand solution, a company executive announced in a conference call with reporters.

By rolling up data from a company’s pipeline, Oracle’s CRM On-Demand Release 17 will be able to extract visibility from the system, explained Anthony Lye, senior vice president and global lead for CRM, Oracle. “Combined with a rearview mirror, the new release gives the ability to adjust the forecast for a more accurate report,” he added.

Lye said the capability has been with the offering for some time now, but the company has introduced some enhancements with the latest release. The enhanced forecasting module gives firms the ability to analyze current and historical forecast data against real-time information to evaluate trends, achievements, and quotas.

Redefining Enterprise-grade SaaS
Through its CRM On-Demand solution, Lye said Oracle is trying to redefine the meaning of enterprise-grade SaaS, which stands on the four pillars of insight, infrastructure, security, and pre-packaged integrations.

“We think [enterprise-grade SaaS] is a unique position for vendors, because the requirements are different [compared with other SaaS offerings],” he noted.

Initially, though, CRM On-Demand was conceived to be pitched for small businesses “who have no CRM before, and have little to no IT equipment and staff.” What happened, according to Lye, was that enterprises started picking up on the offering, because there was no need for them to hire IT staff for maintenance, and the cost was relatively lower.

“In addition, we found out that for small businesses, CRM is nothing more than contact management,” Lye stressed. For firms with 50 or more employees, however, CRM becomes a process automation tool, which calls for the need to have analytics to see how the business is changing.

Because of this market reality, Lye said, they have seen more adoption of CRM On-Demand by enterprise customers, prompting a shift in direction. “Salesforce.com has an 80 average number of users per instance. We have around 150 users per instance, so yes, I’d say most of our adopters are from the enterprise,” he cleared.

In the Pipeline
In the next few years, Lye said Oracle is slowly carving a niche that will fulfill cross-channel CRM, which delivers the same level of experience across all channels. “It’s a hard feat, but it’s something that every [CRM provider] has to do,” he noted.

Part of this initiative is the move towards social CRM, which the executive said is one of the capabilities to be built into the product in the near future. “It’s certainly something we can focus on. But on a purely CRM perspective, social media has a very disruptive characteristic,” he explained, adding that the dynamics of social media—where customers talk to each other based on a certain level of comfort—is slowly being integrated into the system.

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By Chris Kanaracus
IDG News Service (Boston Bureau)
April 29, 2010

BOSTON - Oracle’s unlimited license agreements (ULAs) can make great sense for companies that want to use a lot of the vendor’s software, but a number of potential pitfalls can get buried in the fine print, according to a new report from Forrester Research.

The topic of ULAs is especially timely, as Oracle is in its fourth fiscal quarter, meaning the company is scrambling to sign deals before the fiscal year ends.

Oracle ULAs usually last for three years, upon which they revert to a normal model based on metrics, or a new ULA is negotiated, Forrester said in the report, which was authored by analysts Duncan Jones, Liz Herbert and Rory Stanton.

ULAs have their benefits for both Oracle and customers, Forrester said. Customers can deploy software as they wish, rather than having to be parsimonious with a fixed number of licenses. They also don’t need to spend time managing licenses to ensure compliance.

In turn, Oracle gains because customers are more likely to standardize on its products, shoving competitors out of the picture.

However, “calling the contract ‘unlimited’ doesn’t make it so,” the report adds.

Customers should scrutinize ULA clauses that cover licensing scope. Language providing coverage not just for the customer but also other entities, such as majority-owned affiliates and 50 percent joint ventures, should be included, the report notes.

ULAs must also have some type of mechanism for adding or removing products, as customers may find they don’t have all the software they truly need or that they have unnecessary software, as the agreement unfolds. Ideally, the same discount off list price agreed upon for the original ULA, which is often substantial, should apply to new purchases, Forrester said.

Oracle’s frequent acquisitions present another issue for ULAs. The report cites an example of one unnamed ULA customer who “found that Oracle’s
acquisition of BEA had made some of the products obsolete, and so it faced an excessive cost to switch to equivalent BEA functionality.”

ULAs should provide some protections against such scenarios, according to Forrester: “If Oracle subsumes your product within a different product that you haven’t licensed, you should be able to use, install and upgrade to that new product, provided you don’t use functionality that wasn’t in the one you bought.”

Miro Consulting, a Woodbridge, New Jersey, firm that advises clients on Oracle contract negotiations, finds that many end up unhappy with the ULAs they sign, according to company President Eliot Arlo Colon.

There are three crucial tasks customers interested in a ULA must complete before putting pen to paper, Colon said.

First, they “need buy-in from different business areas, not just IT. You need at least one unbiased person to do a sanity check,” he said.

“The second thing, and this is the hardest thing for CIOs, is you want to go into this and pretend you’re a startup or entrepreneur,” Colon added. “If I’m an entrepreneur, and this is my startup business, and write an agreement from scratch, what would I do?” This approach will help a customer avoid blithe acceptance of seemingly boilerplate contract terms, he said.

Finally, ULAs are much more complex than many people realize, Colon said. “Whatever time you think you’re going to need, you probably need to double it.” In fact, companies should start at least a year in advance of signing a deal, he said.

Ultimately, ULAs simply must be placed into the proper perspective, according to Colon.

“You’re still getting a tremendous amount of product at a very low cost,” he said. “It’s a very complex, custom volume agreement. If you take it from that standpoint, you have to see if it makes sense. For some clients it does.”

An Oracle spokeswoman declined comment.

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By Jon Brodkin
Network World (US)
April 29, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - Cloud computing is making it easier for start-ups to develop new technology, but once companies grow beyond a certain size they may find current cloud technologies do not meet their requirements, tech investors said during Interop in Las Vegas this week.

The ability to spin up multiple virtual machines on a hosted cloud computing service like Amazon EC2 makes testing new software products much simpler than in the days when companies were forced to provision their own servers, venture capitalists said during a panel discussion on cloud computing.

FAQ: Cloud computing, demystified

“You can iterate a lot and get feedback faster,” said Ping Li, an investor at Accel Partners. “You’re able to experiment in the wild, as opposed to experimenting in the labs or in your head.”

But the cloud is designed for the lowest common denominator, Li said. Eventually, a company’s technology becomes so complex that it must be customized to fit the needs of specific applications, and those levels of complexity are not yet available in the cloud. And at certain economies of scale, it may not be cheaper to rent storage or server space from Amazon than it is to host it internally, investors said.

“The higher levels of complexity in the cloud stack isn’t there yet to do the things a highly tuned application like Facebook and Twitter needs to do,” Li said. “That’s not to say the cloud won’t get there, but the cloud gap exists.”

That’s one of the reasons enterprises are interested in building so-called private cloud networks, which are managed internally but use a similar architecture as public cloud services.

“The gap between what IT does behind the firewall and what is done in the cloud is pretty wide,” said Guy Horowitz, a principal investor at Gemini Israel Funds. Horowitz also notes that cloud providers are typically not offering service-level agreements worthy of the enterprise, a problem that panelists said is unlikely to be solved anytime soon.

“There’s a reason these SLAs have no teeth,” Horowitz says. “If they were able to guarantee uptime and performance they would be selling it. … It’s not in the best interests [of cloud vendors] to provide specific SLAs that can be enforced.”

Although cloud computing is one of the hottest parts of the technology market, investors said there is risk in choosing the wrong cloud companies to invest in. Many start-ups are building technology that enhances the capabilities of Amazon EC2 and other cloud services, but they run the risk of Amazon developing the same functionality and eliminating the need for the third-party vendor.

“We all ask, is this a feature or is this a company? If it’s a feature, Amazon will innovate on it,” said Allan Leinwand of Panorama Capital.

That’s not always the case, though, Li said. Amazon’s core expertise is not enterprise software, even though it is the most prominent vendor offering cloud-based virtual server and storage capacity.

“Amazon’s not a software company,” Li said. “We’ve seen them not do as well building layers on top of the stack as you would think.”

Venture capitalists have one goal when they invest in start-ups: to make money through either an acquisition or IPO. There are many companies that seem poised to buy cloud start-ups, but the investors disagreed on which companies will do the buying.
Rackspace and GoGrid are likely to buy new technology to better compete against Amazon, Horowitz said.

Mark Fernandes, managing director of Sierra Ventures, said IBM, CA, HP, Dell and Microsoft will also be aggressive in the cloud acquisition market.

Fernandes also contended that AT&T and Comcast will make cloud buys, a notion Leinwand disagreed with. Service providers are unlikely to get in the enterprise software game, Leinwand said, and may look at AT&T’s Synaptic cloud service as a warning signal.

“AT&T announced Synaptic. Name a customer,” Leinwand said.

Oracle is a company to watch out for in the cloud M&A market, he said.

“Oracle has been relatively quiet in this space and that’s going to change,” he said.

Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jbrodkin

Read more about data center in Network World’s Data Center section.

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By Joab Jackson
IDG News Service (New York Bureau)
April 23, 2010

NEW YORK - At the Cloud Computing Expo held this week in New York, executives from Microsoft and Oracle shared how they see cloud computing working its way into the enterprise.

The companies offered disparate visions, however, with Microsoft emphasizing its public cloud offerings and Oracle touting tools for building out internal clouds.

Both software giants agreed, however, that enterprise use of clouds is best done on an as-needed basis, in what their executives called “a hybrid model.”

“I’d argue that if you’d run today’s applications in the cloud with exactly the same utilization as you would in your own data center … [it] will probably cost you more,” said Hal Stern, Oracle president and former Sun Microsystems chief technology officer for services, during one talk.

The advantage of the cloud, Stern argued, is elasticity. It is those “impulse functions of demand, where you want to go to 100 CPUs to 1,000 CPUs, but give them back,” he said.

“If you look at every one of the cases that has been held up as a great case of public cloud, they ran for a period time and then put the resources back,” Stern said. “That’s what made them cost effective.”

Routine daily functions, such as payroll or supply chain, may not benefit as much in a cloud deployment (though consumed in a software-as-a-service model, they may reduce complexity).

So the challenge for organizations, Stern contended, is to prepare an enterprise infrastructure for a hybrid model, or a model in which some work is computed in house while other jobs are executed in the cloud. “If we really good at defining that packaging and release engineering, we can use a mix of public and private resources,” he said.

As it happens, Oracle chose this conference to announce a new set of products that speed the packaging and deployment of internal applications.

One offering, the Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder (OVAB) allows organizations to create virtual appliances from commonly used infrastructure programs, such as Web servers and databases, so they can be pulled off the shelf and quickly deployed.

“When building multitier applications, it is inevitable that you will have to piece together multiple components,” said Arvind Jain, Oracle product strategy director, in a presentation of the new technologies. “The ideal environment for the application developer teams would be an IT infrastructure that would be easily and readily provisioned, so the teams can focus on the application logic.”

The other offering, the Oracle WebLogic Suite Virtualization Option, is designed to speed run-times of virtualized Java applications by eliminating the guest operating system that would otherwise be needed to run the application in a virtual container.

This second package consists of a WebLogic application server integrated the Oracle JRockit Virtual Edition, a version of its Java runtime engine tweaked to run on the Oracle Virtual Machine virtualization platform.

“Taking out the guest OS might seem completely counter-intuitive. But JRockit Virtual Edition incorporates the pieces that you need for the VM to run,” said Erik Bergenholtz, Oracle director of product management, during the same presentation.

Bergenholtz noted taking out the guest OS in each virtual machine means more virtual machines can be packed on a server, and they could run faster as well.

In internal tests, Oracle has found that this approach can speed run-times by 33 percent: While a reference application running on standard WebLogic server executed 225 operations per second, the WebServer/JRocket combo executed 348 operations per second.

While Oracle emphasized the tools needed to quick cloud and virtual deployments, Microsoft emphasized its public cloud offerings, while also touting the hybrid approach.

“We are very serious about the cloud. We view it as a natural extension of on-premise software,” said Yousef Khalidi, a Microsoft distinguished engineer working on the Microsoft Azure cloud offering, during his talk. “We believe in a hybrid model going forward, that would span the whole spectrum.”

Cloud computing is different from simply rehosting, for a number of reasons, Khalidi said.

For one, applications must be built with “scale-out architectures, rather than scale-up architectures,” he said. This means that if you need an application to serve more users, you should be able to spin out more instances of that application. “You have to think about state in a different way.”

The software must be set up on a services-based operational model. “This model emphasizes application service management, not server management. If you still have to patch the virtual machines and worry about firewalls, then that’s not cloud computing. That’s more like hosting,” he said.

On the hardware side, the cloud model has to be one of “very large uniform systems,” he said. “The topology is basically fixed.” This approach minimizes the amount of configuration needed for setting up a new cloud-based service. This also allows a service to be run anywhere.

Khalidi’s talk focused on what enterprise cloud services Microsoft already runs. Versions of Windows Server, SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange and other Microsoft programs are available as a service, he noted.

The company also commercially offers its Windows Azure “operating system in the cloud,” which allows organizations to build and run their own cloud-based applications. The software is updated frequently and payments can be done on either per-usage or volume discounting.

“We want to provide you the power of choice: You decide, based on your business needs, where you want to [run] the application,” Khalidi told the audience. “You can acquire software and run it yourself, you [can] use a host model, a compute cloud model, or a hybrid model.”

One choice Khalidi did not discuss much was that of running a private cloud, or run services in a cloud model for internal consumption, from within an organization’s firewalls.

During the question-and-answer session, one audience member asked if Microsoft would release the Azure tools so they could be used for private clouds. Khalidi said the Microsoft would release these tools, but that “they are not there yet,” in terms of being packaged for private cloud use.

Later, in a chat with IDG News Service, Khalidi said that Microsoft plans not only to offer most of its software as cloud offerings, but also offer the technologies it uses for enabling cloud services as stand-alone products. The two will go hand-in-hand, he said.

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By Joab Jackson
IDG News Service (New York Bureau)
April 12, 2010

NEW YORK - James Gosling, the creator of the Java programming language, has resigned from Oracle, he announced in a blog entry on Friday

Gosling resigned on April 2 and has not yet taken a job elsewhere, he reported.

“As to why I left, it’s difficult to answer: just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good,” he wrote.

Gosling was the chief technology officer for Oracle’s client software group and, before that, the chief technology officer of Sun’s developer products group.

In 1991, heled a small group of engineers in a project, then called Oak, to build an object-oriented programming language that would run on a virtual machine, which would allow programs to run on multiple platforms, such as television set-top boxes. This work evolved into Java, which took off in conjunction with the growing use of the Internet, thanks in part to its inclusion into the Netscape browser.

Gosling follows a number of other noted ex-Sun employees out the door since Oracle’s purchase of the company was finalized in January, including CEO Jonathan Schwartz, and XML co-inventor Tim Bray.

Less than a month ago, Gosling had stressed the importance of Java to Oracle. “Oracle has certainly been incredibly committed to keeping Java and the whole ecosystem as strong and as healthy as can be,” he said, during a talk at a Java symposium in Las Vegas.

But around the same time he also expressed dismay over the growing politicization of the Java Community Process.

Fellow ex-Sun alumni Bray tweeted that he was “astounded that Gosling held on so long.”

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By Chris Kanaracus
IDG News Service (Boston Bureau)
March 26, 2010

BOSTON - Oracle has adopted what amounts to an “all or nothing” hardware support policy, according to a document the vendor has posted on its Web site.

The policy, which went into effect March 16, states that “when acquiring technical support, all hardware systems must be supported (e.g., Oracle Premier Support for Systems or Oracle Premier Support for Operating Systems) or unsupported.”

It includes all systems running Solaris version 10.9 or later, those running Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM, as well as “all hardware systems for which you have applied services received under a technical support contract for another hardware system (including sharing of updates, patches, fixes, security alerts, work-arounds, configuration/installation assistance or parts).”

Customers who don’t purchase support for hardware systems aren’t allowed to obtain “maintenance releases, patches, telephone assistance, or any other technical support services.”

Machines that have reached the end of their useful life, or which are registered as “retired,” are not affected by the policy.

The policy also lists costs that will incur in the event a customer’s hardware support contract lapses for longer than 90 days, or if one was never originally purchased.

These systems must be determined “service ready” by Oracle, which requires customers to “acquire the Premier Support Qualification Service (at the then current fees) and meet all requirements set forth by the service team to obtain a qualification certificate for your hardware system.”

A reinstatement charge also applies. The fee amounts to “150% of the last-paid support fee, or 150% of the list technical support price for the covered hardware system, prorated from the date technical support is being ordered back to the date technical support lapsed (or the hardware order date if technical support was never purchased).”

Customers also must buy the “Premier Support Qualification Service” when they want to move up from operating system support to Premier Support for Systems.

Citing time constraints due to Oracle’s quarterly earnings report, which will be released Thursday, an Oracle spokeswoman said she could not immediately provide comment on the new policy. Pricing information for the support tiers was also not available Thursday.

Since Oracle moved to acquire Sun Microsystems, observers have speculated about how it will derive more revenue from the hardware business it gained, as hardware has lower profit margins than Oracle is used to making on software licenses and maintenance fees.

The hardware support policy is “an indication to us that Oracle is starting to inject its discipline in the Sun business,” JMP Securities analyst Patrick Walravens said in a research note.

“Our view is that Oracle is likely to take a harder line in terms of enforcing its support policies than Sun did, particularly in the small to medium-sized business market,” Walravens wrote. “Our checks suggest that some of these customers sometimes used patches from supported machines on unsupported machines.”

SMBs might look to alternatives as a result, but Oracle’s move may prove effective with bigger customers, Walravens added. “To avoid the hassle of registering each machine, larger accounts may increasingly move to site license arrangement. In the end, our checks suggest Oracle is focused on the higher-end customers who want support and are willing to pay for it on every machine.”

Oracle is pushing a vision of soup-to-nuts systems spanning storage and servers to applications, saying the tight integration of all those components will pay big dividends for customers.

“The question is, can Oracle deliver such amazing performance by owning the [entire] stack that the big customers will want to stay with them?” Walravens said in an interview.

But enterprises are also looking for “a single point of accountability,” instead of the finger-pointing that can occur over problems when multiple vendors are involved in a system, Walravens said.

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By Paul Krill
InfoWorld (US)
March 24, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - As Oracle has been prone to do for the past nine months, company officials Tuesday pledged a strong commitment to Java technology. They even offered glimpses of a modular future for the platform.

Oracle vice president Jeet Kaul, who is a former Sun Java official, and Oracle senior vice president Steve Harris offered perspectives on Java and road maps on technologies, including the GlassFish application server that serves as a reference implementation for Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 6. The two officials spoke at the at the EclipseCon 2010 conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

Oracle became proprietor of Sun Microsystems Java technologies when its acquisition of Sun, announced last April, closed in January. The company has been offering reassurances to Java developers about the future of Java at different intervals since the JavaOne conference in San Francisco last June.

“[Java is] incredibly important to our business,” Harris said. Priorities for Java at Oracle include adding to the developer base, boosting adoption, increasing competitiveness, and adapting to change, according Oracle.

“The key part of the Java story is the platform. That’s the key part of its success,” Kaul said, noting Java features a language as well. While Oracle has been an Eclipse Foundation participant for years, Sun always shunned the foundation. Now, former Sun officials can embrace Eclipse too.

The upcoming Java Development Kit (JDK) 7 will feature modularity, thus offering benefits in performance, scalability, and packaging, Kaul said. Modularity is featured as part of the Java Specification Request (JSR) 294 support in JDK 7. JSRs are proposals within the Java Community Process for amending Java. Other capabilities in JDK 7 are derived from JSR 203, which offers I/O APIs, and JSR 292, supporting dynamically typed languages on the Java platform. Java EE 6 also has featured modularity.

Following his presentation, Kaul offered assurances that there will be a Java EE 7 released at some point. “I’m sure there is going to be,” said Kaul. Beyond Java EE 6, modularity will be key, according to the Oracle officials.

OSGi, meanwhile, plays an important part of the Java ecosystem and Java platform overall, Harris said.

GlassFish is to be upgraded later this year with version 3.1, featuring clustering, state replication, and coherence. Virtualization will be featured in an update to GlassFish planned for the first half of next year.

Kaul also lauded the JavaFX platform for providing rich user interfaces based on Java.

A Java developer attending EclipseCon felt reassured by Oracle.

“I think I was nervous about Sun was going to go with — or rather where Oracle was going to go — after they acquired Sun,” said developer Alan Hantke, of Intuit. “I think they’re going to continue the legacy of a fine product.”

Also at EclipseCon this week, Microsoft release updates to Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse, offering bug fixes and compatibility with version 1.1 of the Windows Azure SDK. Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse is a plug-in for PHP developers to write and deploy applications to the Azure cloud platform.

Microsoft also said it would release an updated version of Eclipse Tools for Silverlight (eclipse4SL) this spring. Eclipse Tools for Sliverlight enables developers to use the Eclipse IDE to build applications running on the Microsoft Silverlight runtime.

Red Hat at the conference announced general availability of JBoss Enterprise Web Platform 5.0, providing a Java application platform leveraging the Java EE Web Profile and offering a lightweight, enterprise version of the JBoss Application Server.

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By Mikael Ricknäs
IDG News Service (Stockholm Bureau)
March 24, 2010

STOCKHOLM - Opera Software has submitted the iPhone version of its Mini browser to Apple for App Store approval, Opera said on Tuesday.

That browser version was first shown at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February, and Opera has since worked hard at getting the product as much attention as possible.

Opera is convinced that the browser will be approved by Apple, because of the improved speed it offers compared to Safari and the fact that it already has 50 million users, according to Tor Odland, head of communications at Opera. Internal testing shows that Opera Mini will be up to six times faster than Apple’s Safari browser, according to Opera. The increased speed is in large part because Mini uses a proxy server to compress and reformat Web pages before they are transmitted to the phone.

Using compression also helps consume less data, which is a good thing when users are abroad and mobile data costs more, Opera said.

Other features Opera hopes will attract iPhone owners are support for tabs and speed dial, a feature that provides direct access to favorites via thumbnail images on the start page.

Not everyone is as convinced as Opera that the browser will be approved. Back in February, Paolo Pescatore, analyst at CCS Insight, said that it’s highly unlikely that Apple will approve the application, and Pescatore hasn’t heard anything since then to make him change his opinion. But in the end, everyone will have to wait and see what will happen next, according to Pescatore.

Apple didn’t respond to calls for a comment.

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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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