M.C. Hammer

  • September 24, 2012
  • All right!  Recess is over!  If you went to Dreamforce last week you can be forgiven for taking a kind of victory lap in your head today because it was a truly great experience, besides if you are like me you are still tired.  One reason I think so many people like Dreamforce is its relentless focus on the future and on what will likely become standard practice in the not too distant future.  But also, if you went to the keynotes from M.C. Hammer to Colin Powel to Richard Branson to Tony Robbins, you left San Francisco with a certain “lightness of being.”

    However, if you are an analyst you need to put all of that behind you and get ready for Oracle OpenWorld (OOW), which promises to be a barn burner for its own reasons.  Same city, same Moscone Center, same closed Howard Street, similar large crowd — where Dreamforce was all about the social enterprise, OpenWorld is about a lot that might not be so clearly connected.  There’s hardware and operating systems and then software for the back office, front office, databases, middleware, and development tools.  There are things I’m leaving out too like the America’s Cup.  At OOW Oracle will provide a glimpse of its own into what the future looks like for the enterprise and in some ways it’s very different from what Salesforce is talking about and in some ways they are similar.

    This is not to say that one vision is less good than the other, far from it.  The competing visions reflect different world views and different realities.  For instance, while Salesforce approaches things from a clean slate perspective, Oracle takes the view that what it introduces has to work with what delivered before.  You can see this in its disciplined approach to supporting customers of the companies it bought way back in 2005.

    Companies like Siebel and PeopleSoft whose products are getting long in the tooth and are prime targets for Oracle’s new offerings that are based on its platform called Fusion.  You may recall that Fusion went GA (that’s general availability, not the mid-night train), more or less, at last year’s OpenWorld but it hasn’t exactly set the world on fire and there are persistent rumors that the stuff doesn’t work very well or that it requires a phalanx of consultants to make it do its tricks.

    The big hurdle for Oracle therefore will be to convince the assembled multitude that Fusion is real and that the path to the future goes through the intersection of Fusion and Big Iron.

    Speaking of big iron, last year the company rolled out some additional gear to complement its Exalogic computing devices.  It seems this family of hardware is built and optimized for very big jobs involving terabytes of data gazillions of users.  That’s exactly the kind of stuff the growing cloud computing movement might gobble up.  Currently data centers are masses of commodity servers in racks running feverishly but without a layer of sophisticated management that would optimize their utilization and reduce costs.

    There has been an interesting series of articles by James Glanz here and here in the New York Times over the last few days focusing on the power consumption and pollution caused by data centers.  The pollution comes from diesel generators periodically fired up to test the centers’ ability to withstand a power interruption.  The consumption is gargantuan.

    But a bigger question, for which there are ready answers, asks why so much power demand?  Part of the answer lies in how many companies are avoiding the necessary virtualization that will make the cloud much more efficient and sustainable.  According to the Times and backed up by McKinsey & Company, which did the analysis, conventional data centers run many CPUs and disks at much less than capacity in part to cater to the urban myth of the need to keep one company’s data separate from another’s.

    You’ve heard me on this before using the metaphor that we comingle our funds in banks and overlay the pool of deposits with metadata like account numbers and statements.  Why are we resisting do this with data?  Companies like Salesforce are already doing the same virtualization in the cloud and Oracle has an opportunity to strongly support virtualization and point to a more sustainable future.

    Will it?

    I’m going out on a limb to say yes.  Maybe it won’t happen right away but keep in mind that two or three years ago Larry Ellison ridiculed the cloud and now that he has modern hardware and software he’s a big proponent.  The next logical step would be to endorse the Exa-hardware as a sustainability tool for a power hungry planet.  I’m looking for some sustainability messaging from Oracle and it could even happen.

    This is not a digression.  Sustainability is not alien to ideas like mobility, cloud, social and analytics, you can’t separate them.  I think if Oracle wants to maintain its leadership position with many of the largest companies in the world, it needs to put a stake in the ground and become a thought leader here.  The next decade in IT won’t be like the one that preceded it and if Oracle simply comes out with a grocery list for replacing old hardware and applications with more modern stuff it will be missing a great opportunity.  At the end of the day people go to these conferences looking for new ideas and things they haven’t seen before.  That’s what I’ll be watching for.

    Published: 12 years ago