Ellison’s son is an Oracle of movie hits

When “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” topped the box office last weekend, it was a surprising outcome to many.

But for the 28-year-old son of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, the film’s success was a vindication of his early support for the project that led him to finance half of its $145 million budget.

The latest “Mission: Impossible” film is just one of several movies being co-financed by Paramount and Skydance, the production and financing company started by Larry Ellison’s son, David.

Skydance gives Paramount a way to share the risk on big-budget films or movies with uncertain commercial prospects.

When Skydance finalized its deal with Paramount in 2010, the studio had been without a long-term financing partner since 2008. In the interim, the studio had been relying on various companies like Spyglass.

But Paramount still had a strong track record at the box office, which, along with the fact that the studio seemed to be looking for a strategic partner, appealed to David Ellison.

A source close to the deal says the studio reached an agreement with Ellison in part because execs discovered they and the Oracle scion had very similar tastes.

But another source familiar with the situation indicated that the fact that David was Larry Ellison’s son made Paramount feel like he was a reliable investor.

Indeed, Larry Ellison supplied an undisclosed amount of the $150 million in equity Skydance raised. Skydance also put together $200 million in a revolving -credit facility led by JPMorgan.

Paramount offers films it wants Skydance to co-finance to Ellison’s company early in their development. The percentage of the budget Skydance finances depends on the film.

The partnership has provided Paramount with a way to hedge their bets on risky movies like the Coen brothers’ Western, “True Grit”; Skydance financed 50 percent of its $38 million budget.

More recently, Skydance stepped in to help finance Paramount’s reportedly pricey zombie film, “World War Z.” The deal also gives Paramount an option to distribute movies that Skydance develops.

Source: HILARY LEWIS @ http://www.nypost.com/

Read more ...

Oracle, Cisco crow new database flash dash record

Best 2-CPU server result ever - with Violin's chips. Oracle claims a world-record TPC-C result with its database running on a Cisco server and not an Exadata system, although doesn't mention that two Violin memory flash arrays were needed.

A Cisco UCS C250 extended memory server with two six-core Xeon X5690 processors, 384GB of DRAM, and two Violin Memory flash arrays (5.3TB V-3205 and 16.3TB V-6000) ran Oracle's 11g database on Oracle Linux, and scored 1,053,100 transactions per minute (tpmC), with a cost per transaction of $0.58.

This was the third lowest cost-per-tpmC ever, only being beaten by the $0.49/tpmC and $0.51/tpmC of two four-processor HP Proliant systems running SQL Server. The $0.51/tpmC result used six Violin Memory V3200 flash arrays, each with with 2.6TB of flash. The $0.49 HP result used flash as well; HP P2000 array with 128 300GB SAS disk drives and D2700 enclosure with 256 120GB SSDs.

Oracle says its tech "delivered more performance, and cost nearly 11 per cent less per tpmC than the nearest competition on a configuration using identical Intel processors and memory capacity", referring to an HP result of 1,024,380 tpmC and $0.65/tpmC with a ProLiant DL380. This server featured 81 400GB SSDs plus 104 disk drives.

Both Cisco's and Oracle's canned quotes somehow forgot to mention the Violin arrays, which was somewhat surprising as the Violin storage represented the vast majority of the $602,316 bill for the tested configuration.

Kevin Closson, a technology director and performance architect in the Data Computing Division of EMC, tweeted about the result, saying: "Style: Get world record result and don't mention key storage technology that made it possible. See the word Violin?"

He also said that Violin doesn't mention Oracle on its benchmark result page, which is not quite true; the Violin page has a hot-link to the Cisco UCS tpmC result which does mention Oracle.

Source: Chris Mellor @ http://www.theregister.co.uk

Read more ...

Oracle CEO's beautiful Woodside farm

Have a look at this interesting business news article:

Oracle CEO's beautiful Woodside farm - Rediff.com Business Passionate about buying land, Ellison, co-founder and chief executive officer of Oracle Corporation, has acquired some of most beautiful houses and land since the 1990's. | Oracle CEO's beautiful...

Read entire article >

Cheers,
Ondrej Kubes

Read more ...