Larry J. Ellison at Oracle Open World 2009

(This is my near real-time blog. Most of the content was keyed in real time and later was little bit polished .)

Wednesday was the Larry's keynote day. Today at 2:45pm it was scheduled in the Mascone center where the Oracle Open world is being held. In the beginning, Charles Philip introduced the Diamond sponsor of the event, Infosys and its CEO Mr. S. Gopalkrishnan. His speech was focused on IT led innovation. It had a lot of good content but the presentation needed to be improved. Particularly such a large audience expects some charisma, some laughter and some real life incidents connecting to the crowd. Anyway, after the Infosys' CEO's speech on Innovation, Charlse Philip invited Larry. In his typical black sports jacket and black (crew style) sweat/T shirt, Larry appeared on the stage. Right in the beginning, LJE mentioned the topics he was planning to cover starting with Linux to Fusion Apps. Here are some of the snippets from his presentation.

It seems that flow of his presentation was from OS to dedicated box to monitoring to Fusion Apps.

So LJE started with Linux. Remember 2 years back at OOW he had introduced Oracle Linux and last year he had introduced VM. This year he unified the vision with his comment. In LJE's view, the Virtual VM and OS should blend together for easier to deploy, patch etc. Oracle VM would also support other OSs (like Windows)

Then Larry moved on to Exadata Version 2
Running Oracle enterprise Linux, Sun Oracle Database Machine . He specifically mentioned that this machine is different than the Spark based machine, demonstrated on Sunday, which is 16 times faster than similar from IBM. The customers are getting performance improvement with 10s of times not just in 10s of percentages. Exadata2 is very first database machine aimed for high performance OLTP and not for warehousing like others.
Exadata2 does random IO very rapidly. It is fastest and fault tolerant and consuming less power. 1million disk i/os per sec. Despite 72 racks, IBMS machine is not fault tolerant but very costly. For same money, Exadata is 4 times faster.

Somewhere here we saw "Kalifornia"s governator Mr. Arnold appearing on the stage! He covered a lot on innovation and technology. He mentioned how he could do so much in movies because of the technology. He then moved to clean tech and environment. The only joke that he could create a good laughter was about hands-free cell phone and his wife Maria getting three times caught breaking the hands-free-cellphone law. Anyway, he ended with praising role of Oracle and Sun in innovation, business and employment to California.


Afterward, Larry launched a crusade on IBM with the performance edge of the Exadata. During the course, he also elaborated the key contributors in improving the performance. He emphasized that it is faster than fancy-specialized In-Memory DBs. It is faster because of Grid computing, compression the data, faster movement of data, and with the usage of fast flash drives.
Another advantage of Exadata2 that he mentioned was it has simplified deployment because everything pre-cofigured.
Costs 110,000 - 350,000 - 600,000 ... Start small and grow.

In Summary, Exadata is positioned as:
The Fastest for Warehousing and OLTP, best cost/performance and Fault tolerant & scalable.

This is where Larry offered his $10 million challenge to anyone including IBM to run any apps on similar IBM box with more than half the speed that of Exadata! Read again $10 million!!

Then LJE moved on to monitoring but introduced beyond just monitoring. He introduced the concept of central Global Configuration DB that can be used for Proactive problem prevention. It can be used for Recommends patches, health checks etc. Such system would proactively notify customers based on their configuration about problems and solutions. Then help in problem resolution with automated download, validation and merge patching.

He also elaborated the usage of Business Service Metrics in EM for Detect underlying technical infrastructure failures and then use Correlation Engine to further diagnose the issue. Richard demonstrated the real time problem detection, patching and merging.

Larry's final presentation was the latest and greatest introduction to Fusion Applications. he high-lighted that Fusion apps are:
1. SaaS ready / Cloud Ready
2. Service Oriented Architecture. Because of SOA, it can be easily connected to other apps.
3. Fusion Apps: Replacement Applications and new apps are add on to Apps Unlimited!

This last aspect is a great story to motivate existing customers to upgrade or selectively adapt.

Anyway, during his presentation, Larry mentioned following applications: Talent Management., DOO, Incentive Compensation, Territory management, GRC, etc ... all these apps I provided consultancy to!!!!

While covering details, Larry emphasis following design Principals of Fusion Apps.
1. Standards based middle-ware
2. Embedded business intelligence
3. Modern and consistent UI with integrated collaboration
4. SOA
5. SaaS
Now pause at the third bullet:SOA! Just remember that is the key of the co-exist with apps-unlimited or with any other apps. Isn't it the most important aspect of the Fusion Apps? Oh, I was probably over-emphasizing the area where I played role in SOA-BPM!

Larry then invited Steve Miranda for demonstration of Fusion Apps(I like working with him. A very nice-pleasant personality and good leader). Chris Leon joined Steve for the demos. They demonstrated two scenarios. Both demonstrated a very new way of building apps. Fusion Apps uses BI natively. It also provides real-time collaboration. And I am proud to be one of the key contributor in SOAfying the Fusion Apps!

The overall show was almost 2hrs 15mins and it had engaged all the crowd. Larry does a great job especially without slides. I was hoping some more fire-shots but I guess this was enough. Anyway, Oracle already announced more than half a dozen new releases this week. That itself is overwhelming.

Typically keynote speeches are high on messages and less on details. The audience was looking for a direction and new launches. That way, Fusion Apps and EM based auto patching were the new launches. The Linux-VM and Exadata was the direction or continuation. These two in general and later in specifically suitable for setting a stage for Sun merger. Linux and VM direction was a message of continuity and consistency with previous open worlds.

Analysts also analyze Larry's speeches for his positioning with respect to the competitors. Though RedHat (Linux), Vmware(VM), SAP (Fusion Apps) are direct competitors in those respective markets, Larry did not spend time on those but focused on IBM. It was surprising that he spared SAP too. Isn't it interesting? Is SAP out of picture? Another observation, he did not comment much on cloud computing. However, he respectfully added SaaS in the context of Fusion Apps. In my opinion, such ommissions and commissions give a sense of direction for Oracle. Does it? Especially on the backdrop in Larry's interview a couple of weeks back where he ridiculed the hype of cloud-computing and then affirmed the presence of the cloud-computing. In the contrast, it was missing from today's keynote but SaaS and Linux-VM was added on top of Exadata. BTW I also noticed that Larry quickly adapts to the changes in the environment. So it won't be surprising that he would change his pitch if the environment changes.