Oracle creates Web 2.0 division

Oracle is building a global division to offer businesses products, services and best practices for Web 2.0 collaboration.

Charles Phillips, Oracle's president, speaking in London today (9 May), said Oracle would be forming a Web 2.0 organisation to provide businesses with Webcenter, a new platform for building wikis, blogs and content management for Web 2.0 collaboration. He said, "Over the next few years we will be building collaboration into our enterprise application products."

The process for approving expenses is one area such collaboration would work for business users, Phillips said. Web 2.0 collaboration technology could allow the manager to check a travel expense with the travel agent directly, compare travel costs against previous trips to the same destination and, if the person submitting the expense was online, obtain further clarification using instant messaging.

Phillips said Oracle was also developing a collaborative platform that would take users beyond the functionality provided by e-mail packages such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange. "The Beehive product we are developing we will be able to provide an e-mail [server] and a presence-aware environment," which would allow users to see who else was online.

Phillips said the product would remove the need for businesses to run large server farms to support their Microsoft Exchange infrastructure, as it would use computing grids instead of servers.

Separately, Oracle is also investigating how to make patches update automatically, without requiring enterprise application software to be restarted. Oracle's 11g product family has some of this functionality built-in, but, Phillips said, "It is way too hard to update enterprise application software."

If Oracle is able to crack this problem, Phillips hopes it would be able to offer users continuous releases of its software, which could simplify patch management and upgrading.

Author: Cliff Saran @ www.computerweekly.com

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A conversation with Charles Phillips, president Oracle

This morning I participated in a round table conversation with Charles Phillips, president of Oracle, discussing his take on Enterprise 2.0 technologies and how they apply to Oracle’s view of the enterprise applications space. While there was nothing earth shatteringly new in what he said, some nuggets emerged.

Later this year, Oracle will be launching its Enterprise 2.0 salesforce with WebCenter at the heart of what it offers. Despite the cheesy name: “If you can come up with a better one then I’d like to hear from you”, he quipped, Phillips is putting ‘Enterprise 2.0′ style thinking at the heart of how Oracle not only sells but trains its ecosystem of partners. “Training all or a handful of partners on a small part of what we offer is very expensivewhen you take travel etc into account. We want to move to a more collaborative environment for online training”

I was particularly interested in four areas:

Q: How does Oracle see the difference between external facing customer groups and internal collaboration from an Oracle E2.0 products perspective?

A: We think the concepts are the same though there may be differences such as the need for strong security for the internal collaborative communities. So for us it is the same product but with different emphases.

Q: Given that Oracle is developing new communities and tool, do you see the external work that people like Eddie Awad is doing becoming folded into these new initiatives?

A: I don’t want to pre-announce anything but you can expect to see us deliver some exciting developments in this area.

Q: You seem to be spending a lot of time asking customers questions about their readiness for Enterprise 2.0 style applications. Is this informing product development?

A: There’s always a balance to be struck between what customers want and what we can validate putting into development. Right now there is a demand but we’re also getting people to think more about presence as the form of environment in which they operate.

Q: What are your thoughts on embedding E2.0 style applications into business process?

A: We think there are three components: tasks that can be automated, data and collaboration so we’re working on bringing those together. You might want for example to ask questions about expenses incurred, compare it with other similar expenses or see if the cost is within budget. Enterprise 2.0 applications would help in those circumstances but you can explode that idea out to many other business processes.

Contrary to popular perception, Phillips argued that sales people do wish to collaborate but he agreed they don’t necessarily want C-level oversight. Oracle is hoping it can address efficiency among sales led organizations through the addition of social tools that help sale people easily discover content they can use and re-use in their presentations. “There’s a series of tags people can apply. People can look at past patterns of use, who’s used a particular presentation, share it and so on,” he said.

To the more general point about skepticism among business leaders around the value of Enterprise 2.0 approaches, Phillips agreed there is a significant education process to go through. “All businesses should want to find new pockets of demand but we need to show them what can be done. When we get that opportunity, people love what they see.”

Those of us used to Oracle are accustomed to seeing its executives in ebullient mood. I detected that Phillips was offering a pragmatic view of the world, not declaring victory and recognizing the real world challenges of collaborative environments. That’s to be welcomed. Right now I see a surfeit of applications coming to the E2.0 space and sense that business is in a period of both learning and digestion.

Source: Dennis Howlett @ http://blogs.zdnet.com

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Oracle: Eating its Own Open Source Food

The database giant isn't just into Linux and Xen for the money, is it?

Where in the world's largest database vendor does open source fit? At the very heart, according to Wim Coekaerts, Director of Linux Engineering at database giant Oracle.

Coekaerts leads Oracle's Linux and open source support, which includes OracleVM, the open source Xen-based virtualization hypervisor effort.

In an exhaustive interview with InternetNews.com Coekaerts outlined where Oracle is going with its unbreakable Linux distribution, Linux kernel development and virtualization. (Oracle's Linux support stepped up in 2006 when it announced its own support of Linux based on the binaries of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the number one Linux distributor.)

Coekaerts said the critical thing for Oracle is to actively contribute to the Linux and virtualization communities that serve as the base for Oracle's open source offerings. That doesn't mean he necessarily agrees with what other vendors, in particular Red Hat and XenSource are doing, even though the company works with both of their open source products. The ultimate impact of Oracle's open source effort could well lead to a broader use of Linux and Xen or it could lead to greater fragmentation among the various open source groups supporting the two projects.

Although OracleVM's product is based on Xen, the open source virtualization platform, Oracle is not an official member of the Xen Foundation, which tracks the open source virtualization project.

However, Coekaerts noted that his team talks to Xen project leader Ian Pratt on a weekly basis about what's going on with its Xen development and use, such as a project called Huge Pages. Coekaerts explained that, in a typical operating system, the CPU (define) runs applications in 4k memory chunks known as pages. Huge Pages expands the typical page file from 4k all the way up to 4MB.

"Oracle's [database software] is tough to manage in 4k and the new CPUs from Intel and AMD let you look at 4mb chunks which is useful for Oracle," Coekaerts noted. "Xen doesn't support that today so you have to run 4k pages, which means there is more overhead. We want to make sure Xen is good for Oracle so we're working on Huge Pages."

Coekaerts noted that the majority of what Oracle does with Xen is stability bug fixes that are then contributed back to the mainline of Xen development. Though other vendors, including Citrix, Novell and Red Hat also ship Xen hypervisors, Oracle is trying to differentiate in at least one way.

"We've been trying to explain to customers is this: You're buying OracleVM support and you're getting a product from Oracle that solves your virtualization problem," Coekaerts said. "If people just see Xen, then they ask what version you are running and it's a discussion that goes nowhere. Ultimately they just want support."

Plus, he added, combining OracleVM with Oracle's Unbreakable Linux offering helps the company differentiate its product mix.

"If you have the whole stack you can make things work together," Coekaerts claimed. "Most of the traditional Unix systems have virtualization today where it's the same company that owns the operating system and the virtualization technology."

Coekaerts added that Oracle can offer both virtualization and operating system to customers which is something that Red Hat and Novell can do, but Citrix and VMware can not.

Fundamentally though, Coekaerts argued that Oracle knows what it's talking about because they too are consumers of open source technology.

"We use OracleVM ourselves. We are massive Linux users, we're a customer," Coekaerts said. "We're not just talking to other people and saying what's your pain - we feel the pain. We have thousands of machines running Linux. We're trying to solve our problems which are similar to other organizations."

"To be honest, Red Hat is a small company compared to us," Coekaerts added. "They don't feel that pain they don't even have thousands of servers."

Oracle's version Versus Red Hat's

In October of 2006, Oracle officially announced its Oracle Unbreakable Linux offering, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Ever since then, Oracle has maintained that it is maintaining binary file compatibility with Red Hat.

"Oracle does not compete on product differentiation we want to provide good quality support," Coekaerts stated. "One of the reasons why EL is the same as RHEL is we didn't want to introduce yet another version of Linux. It makes it easy for our ISVs to say this is the same, it's not something new."

Coekaerts added that Oracle contributes all bug fixes back to Red Hat. Oracle does not work on new features for Enterprise Linux. As such Coekaerts argued that there is no reason for Red Hat to argue that Oracle's Linux is different. In fact, arguing that it's different is likely not a good thing for Red Hat, in Coekaerts view.

"What's the biggest piece for a customer? The operating system helps you but it is not the core, it's not the critical piece," Coekaerts said. "We've been very successful. We want to grow the Linux market. We're not trying to convert the existing Red Hat users to Oracle. We just want to make sure that Linux is the best platform to run Oracle."

Author: Sean Michael Kerner @ www.internetnews.com

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