Oracle OpenWorld: Scott McNealy must be smiling
Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison opened this week's Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco with details on the Exalogic Elastic Cloud. The system, built on 360 64-bit x86 processor cores, is interconnected with an InfiniBand-based I/O fabric and solid-state storage with Oracle WebLogic Server, other enterprise Java Oracle middleware products and a choice of Oracle Solaris or Oracle Linux operating system software.
Ellison referred to the system as "one big honkin' cloud" -- which brings back memories of Scott McNealy's pronouncements years back of the world moving to a "big freakin' Webtone switch," which was, in essence, a prediction of cloud computing. McNealy, of course, was chairman of Sun Microsystems, now absorbed into Oracle. In fact, the Exalogic Elastic Cloud is based on the Exadata Database machine, which runs on the former Sun's technology.
Sun struggled -- keyword is struggled -- for years to cobble together a business model that included grand visions for openess and cloudiness, along with the more banal business requirements of selling servers and software. Now, it appears Oracle has come along and figured out a way to fuse this all together and move it to the cloud. Speaking of fusing.... Oracle also launched its line of Fusion apps, all built on service-oriented architecture. As reported here by ZDNet editor-in-chief Larry Dignan, the software is designed to give all of those acquired PeopleSoft, Siebel and J.D. Edwards customers an upgrade path. For a nice blow-by-blow analysis of the Fusion announcement, check out Sadagopan's analysis here at the Enterprise Irregulars site.
And related to this, Hasan Rizvi , senior VP of product development for Oracle, provided an update on Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, stating that more than 14,000 new customers have moved to the platform, along with a third of the existing Oracle Fusion Middleware customers. Rizvi also reported that Oracle Fusion Middleware has been downloaded more than 250,000 times and represents more than 10,820 person years of engineering, 16 million hours of quality assurance and testing, and 18,420 customer-driven enhancements.
By the way, McNealy is now involved with an educational charity project called Curriki, but doesn't seem interested in running another public company.