Oracle promises more cloud love

OpenWorld 08 Oracle is planning partnerships with more cloud computing providers while suggesting it could also deliver cloud services as part of its existing ondemand business.

Executive vice president of product development Chuck Rozwat said Tuesday Oracle's database and software infrastructure sack would "definitely" be updated to work with more providers of cloud computing beyond Amazon's EC2 and S3.

He did not name names or provide dates, but - speaking to press at OpenWorld - indicated he had faith in the future of cloud computing services like EC2.

The currently experimental market will mature into a service for businesses as "people will migrate more and more serious/mission critical applications to the cloud".

"My feeling is people will try it out first, get their IT and business practices down," Rozwat said.

Rozwat called cloud computing an "outgrowth" of what Oracle's being doing for 10 years with its ondemand business.

Asked whether Oracle planned to provide its own server farms for cloud computing, he said Oracle's skills lie in building and optimizing software rather than simply running data centers. Reading between the lines, and given his views on how he expects serious business uptake of cloud in future, that sounded like a "yes" - once there's a business case.

"We have no plans to be in the business of providing just a hardware platform because we think the added value is what we can do around the software, and you call that the cloud," Rozwat said.

Oracle's ondemand business has provided versions of its software to customers on hosted server and storage both on and off customers' premises. Services can be run by customers, Oracle partners or Oracle itself.

Commenting on the work with Amazon, Rozwat said the goal has been to enable customers, partners, and Oracle to use EC2 and S3 easily in conjunction with Oracle's database and middleware products. The crux of the work has been to enable back up to the cloud from Oracle by working with Amazon's virtualization layer.
11g take two

Rozwat, meanwhile, told press that Oracle is still not ready to provide a public delivery date for the next update to its 11g database, released last year. Session after OpenWorld session has focused on 11g, while president Charles Philips announced an interim 11.1.07 release on Monday - although further information on this has so far proved hard to find.

However, there's been no mention of 11g R2 even though it's expected to be relatively big.

Among planned features, the ability to make grids - clustered servers - easier to set up and manage using Oracle's Real Application Clusters (RAC). "We want to make sure customers have access to a set of new tools we have for better monitoring and to be able to react to some issues in the future," Rozwat said.

Author: Gavin Clarke @ www.theregister.co.uk

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Oracle replaces senior Australian exec

ORACLE Asia-Pacific has replaced Australian senior manager Nick Evered with former Hyperion executive Sebastien Marotte.

Mr Evered, Oracle's Asia-Pacific senior vice-president for technology sales, is understood to have left the company earlier this month, as reported in The Australian last week.

Mr Evered's departure follows a rejig of Liberal Party proportions at the database maker.

A few months ago Oracle Asia-Pacific head Brian Mitchell also left the company.

Oracle today confirmed that Mr Marotte had replaced Mr Evered.

Mr Marotte comes to the role with a slight change in job titles. As senior vice-president for the technology business unit, he will provide overall leadership for the company's technology solutions portfolio, business strategy, and market development in the region.

He was previously the company's vice-president of enterprise performance management and business intelligence.

According to Mr Marotte's profile on Oracle's website, he has more than 20 years experience in the business software arena.

Mr Marotte has been with Hyperion for over 15 years in senior management roles across various locations, and was the company's Asia-Pacific vice-president since 2005.

Mr Evered spent more than a decade at Oracle where he began his career in Australia managing its alliances and channels division.

Oracle's new Asia-Pacific head and former BEA executive, Steve Au-Yeung, is said to be fine-tuning the company's operations across the region.

Oracle last week exceeded analysts' expectations by posting a stronger-than-expected quarterly profit. Net income rose from $US840 million to $US1.1 billion in the first quarter ending August 21.
However, Oracle's business management software sales dipped 12 per cent to $US331 million, a performance some analysts expressed concern over.

Author: Fran Foo @ www.australianit.news.com.au

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Oracle 11g 'on track' but questions remain over deployments

49% of the global database market is great but will users upgrade? Oracle Oracle said deployments of its latest 11g database were on track, ahead of the OpenWorld conference, which begins today in San Francisco.

The database has been downloaded 450,000 times since its release last July, Oracle president Chuck Phillips said during a first quarter 2009 earnings conference. Oracle is "seeing significant adoption of 11g, on pace with the 10g adoption curve," he said.

A survey this spring of members of the Independent Oracle Users Group found that 35% plan to upgrade some databases to 11g within a year, higher than previous surveys.

Another survey by database management provider The Pythian Group found that only 1.4% of the 756 databases it manages on behalf of corporate clients are running 11g today.

"Whoever tells you that is awesome is selling you a bill of goods," said Paul Vallee, Pythian's founder and president. The firm still sees plenty of Oracle 7 and 8 databases in use, which were first introduced in 1992 and 1997, he said.
Vallee said 11g upgrades are slow in part because there were fewer compelling new features offered at its launch last year than there were in prior upgrades.

It has "minimal feature pull," he said. Also, companies tend to be conservative about upgrading major pieces of infrastructure, such as databases.

"Our philosophy with Oracle is that it is too bleeding-edge to go with any first release," one DBA told Computerworld last July.

The good news from Pythian's study is that interest is rising. Twenty-five percent of Pythian's clients have tested or deployed some Oracle 11g databases, Vallee said.

Moreover, 11g R2 is expected to introduce major new features in the areas of storage and database performance that could finally compel organizations with aging databases to make the move, he said.

The company had a 49% share of the global database market last year, with US$8.3 billion in revenue, according to Gartner.

Author: Eric Lay @ www.computerworlduk.com

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