Oracle's Ellison nails cloud computing
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison
(Credit: Dan Farber)"The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?
"We'll make cloud computing announcements. I'm not going to fight this thing. But I don't understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud."
I led a panel at the MIT Emerging Technology Conference earlier this week on cloud computing with some of the leaders in the field: David P. Anderson, research scientist, University of California at Berkeley; Matthew Glotzbach, product management director, Google; Parker Harris, EVP, Technology, Salesforce.com; Mendel Rosenblum, chief scientist and co-founder, VMware; and Werner Vogels, VP and CTO, Amazon.com. The group generally agreed that cloud computing involves software running off premises, but that there are different workloads and kinds of scenarios.
The problem is that every tech company now wants to be associated with cloud computing, no matter if their products and services meet the basic criteria. At least Ellison isn't afraid to address the hijacking of the phrase by marketers, including Oracle's.
Frank Gillett of Forrester speaks about the cloud envy of various companies who jump on the cloud computing bandwagon by rebranding existing services in this interview with Beet.TV.
Dan Farber is editor in chief of CBS Interactive News, which includes CBSNews.com and CNET News. He has more than 25 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. E-mail Dan.
So Larry should keep dreaming of price hikes, but the world's already moving and leaving him behind. I think customers have finally figured out why he's got that grin on his face, and a $300 million dollar boat.
I would also disagree with your premise about "no one uses Oracle". This is far from true. If you're talking about individuals, yes fair point. But major businesses dealing with back-end services are more and more interested in moving their installations off-premises. Look at Salesforce.com, as an example. Or Oracle's own On Demand products (the Siebel-acquired offerings, in particular). Also look at the announcement they made this week where they are allowed licensees to obtain virtual machines of Oracle database and middleware products for use on Amazon's cloud platform (EC2).
Implications that they are losing business to MySQL are very unfounded. Can you cite a reference that says MySQL is taking business away from Oracle in the mid to upper-end of the market?
Say what you want about Larry and his monster-sized ego, but the company is doing extremely well. Judging from their stock performance, their excellent Q1 numbers, and the fact that their middleware base is growing more than 100% year-over-year, I don't think the sentiment you're portraying is at all representative of their customer base.
i) Google does it (that way)
ii) Google has bought (into) it
iii) Looks like it might be bought by Google
iv) One of the previous is true for another (more or less) successful web company, e.g. Amazon, Salesforce, etc.
May be we should use the term "Talknology" instead of "Technology" for that stuff ;-)
The bottom line--Oracle will simply help deliver more apps to data centers where they will be hosted as opposed to the customer's site, if they aren't already.
Larry - As a participant in building the cloud, 3tera has customers that would love to use Oracle if your licenses allowed for redistribution and utility based billing.
But then again fads and fashions are not unique to the technology sector. Subprime Loans, SUVs, TQM, and Gourmet hamburger restaurants certainly come to mind.
Expect the "Cloud" to be useful for some business models, but not others.
Inevitably there will be penny wise pound foolish managers with big ambitions who will put all of their eggs in the cloud all at once on a wing and a prayer. Inevitably these same managers will also continue to complain about how expensive and unreliable IT is while watching project costs skyrocket and attempting to gauge their CEOs frustration level.
Nothing in this article says anything about Cloud Computing - only the buzzword marketing of it.
But whatever CNet / Microsoft can use to discredit anything that competes with Microsoft.....
At this point, we allow new apps only on MySQL, none of Oracle. Oracle runs our GL, but that's it, we've fenced it off. And the performance and stability of MySQL has been absolutely fantastic. We can also run it on AmazonWS without any payments. We are now beginning to look at commercial service providers for MySQL services, but going back to oracle will never happen, they burned the bridges, it's their own fault.
When I talk to my peers in other organizations, they're going through the same transition. Oracle didn't do themselves a favor with their salesforce. Arrogant and threatening. I hope that's not true of their whole management team, as well.
Perhaps they should buy MySQL.
<a href="http://www.johnmwillis.com/oracle/oracle-on-amazons-cloud-ec2">Oracle on Amazon?s Cloud (EC2)</a>
John
johnmwillis.com
I.e., you could deploy Oracle apps on a cloud as you would on a regular platform. E.g., on EC2 rather than on a local server. No difference. But that's not the point. I can run an app on a phone, desktop, or EC2 - that doesn't mean all these platforms are the same.
Cloud (which I define as similar to grid) is a great concept with terrific business value. If folks are abusing the term, that doesn't make it any less valuable. You can't take a good concept, interpret in bizarre ways, and then declare it a bad concept.
Guess we know what Ellison thinks of that!