To my untrained ear those InformationWeek sentences don't belong to any real world. This rather suggests that the thing he's talking about, Oracle, belongs more in the boardroom or management suite than in the computer suite.
Somebody, or something, needs shooting down like a Zeppelin.
Over the past three years, through some huge acquisitions as well as internal product transformations, Oracle has evolved into a powerhouse, offering solutions all the way up the stack, from hardware and operating systems to middleware to applications. Only IBM and HP are in comparable positions.
There has been a major push into service oriented architecture during this time, with the software giant providing and promoting a range of solutions in this space.
In a very comprehensive article, InformationWeek’s Bob Evans captured the essence of Oracle’s strategy going forward. Notice how the strategy evolves around convincing CIOs to buy into the entire stack:
- “Expand and accelerate — dramatically — the potentially massive global market for highly optimized and integrated hardware-software systems, and then dominate that market.”
- “Convince CIOs that a complete IT stack purchased from Oracle will deliver not only sufficient openness to avoid the dreaded vendor lock-in, but also superior performance compared with heterogeneous combinations.”
- “Convince CIOs that the combination of 1 and 2 above will lower the costs of assembling, setting up, testing, tuning, managing, integrating, trouble-shooting, fixing, upgrading, and running those systems.”
- “Complete that infrastructure with ultra-modern Fusion applications that can run with existing enterpise apps, from Oracle or anyone else.”
- “Win in vertical markets like retail, healthcare, and telecom by complementing the broad horizontal apps with deep industry knowledge and functionality.”
