Benioff Speaks
When his part was over Marc Benioff could look back on a keynote that was fresh and interesting for OpenWorld but without a great deal of the controversy that had been expected. There are definite differences between Benioff and Larry Ellison and their respective companies. Benioff preaches openness, cloud, social, mobile and other modern technologies that will constitute the infrastructure of the future. “We’re not here to sell another mainframe,” he said at his impromptu keynote.
Ellison on the other hand, has a huge legacy installed base to convert and his options may be more limited than Benioff. IT doesn’t help that Salesforce has been executing on its vision for several years while Oracle is in some ways just getting out of the starting gate. Ellison will speak today at 2:45 PM PDT and will no doubt have some answers to Benioff’s speech. Stay tuned.
Marc, Call Your Tailor #OOW11
A couple years ago Marc Benioff dazzled the audience at Dreamforce by pulling four phones out of his suit jacket to make the point that his products run across many platforms and technologies. The high point of the talk happened when, after pulling out all those phones, Benioff pulled out an iPad from his pants. We all laughed and he made his point.
Now though there is an implied challenge from Oracle at OpenWorld. Oracle has made a faux iPad which is on display at Oracle OpenWorld. It’s a 70 inch HD TV displaying screens from Oracle applications. It’s not real but it’s fun. The next move might be Marc’s or not.
A Long Way From The Churchill Club #oow11
Two years ago almost to the day, Larry Ellison interviewed with Ed Zander at the Churchill Club. In the video you see him poking fun at the cloud. Just two years later Ellison is the cloud’s biggest promoter, in fact he exemplifies Kennedy’s maxim that “Victory has a hundred fathers, defeat is an orphan.” In two years Oracle has gotten the social and cloud religion and done a stunning job of building out products in multiple directions. Historically, this rivals Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus.
OOW Monday October 3, 2011 — Platform 1
Note: I am trying out something. This is a short post that focuses on one point of Oracle OpenWorld. Tweets are too short for this kind of post and I cannot think of a better way to deliver this information than through a short post. So here it is.
Last week I speculated about the emergence of an Oracle platform. My reasoning was that all the pieces seemed to be in place. It is a simple hypothesis that can be easily proved or not. Last night Larry Ellison introduced — actually re-introduced — most of the infrastructure. He also talked about the cloud and fault tolerance which are necessary parts.
The new line of Sun based Exa-gear including Exadata storage and Exalogic compute servers have grown and improved over the last year and last night Ellison introduced Exalytics an analytics processing engine thingy. It’s hard to get all the names and terms right so soon but that’s it.
The important part of this post is that I think we have the foundation of the Oracle platform. We need to know more about applications and tools but based on the sessions scheduled and the banners on the street I think we’re in for an interesting ride this week.
Right now they’re demonstrating how to handle Big Data in big companies, another important part of the platform strategy.
