Oracle OpenWorld 2011

Oracle Corp. delivered a series of announcements at its OpenWorld event in San Francisco this past week. Fusion applications made its long-awaited appearance along with more information on Oracle's public cloud. The company also previewed its new Unbreakable Linux Kernel. 

Focal Points:

• After a long six-year wait, Oracle finally revealed its new Fusion Application Suite. The Fusion applications are a rewrite from the ground up of all the business logic embodied in the Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel, JD Edwards, and a number of other applications that the company built or acquired in the past 15 years. The suite is written in Java, uses BPEL to interface the applications to external applications, and includes more than 100 modules encompassing financial, human capital, project portfolio management, and supply chain as well as compliance, governance and procurement applications. Missing are discrete and process manufacturing and wholesale and retail distribution modules as well as a number of industry vertical extensions. It has a social media feel to it, with chat, Web conferencing, and collaboration built in. They can run on- or off-premise, or in a Software as a Service mode and can be accessed from PCs as well as a variety of mobile devices.
• CEO Larry Ellison boasted that the Oracle public cloud is built on standards – i.e., Java, BPEL, SOA, SQL, Web services, etc. The Oracle cloud also supports Oracle databases and the Fusion applications and middleware. He contrasted the Oracle offering with that of Salesforce.com's proprietary cloud offerings. One of the differences he addressed was multi-tenancy. He shot down the Salesforce.com multi-tenancy model, which he stated was outdated and insecure. The Oracle cloud instead provides each user with its own virtual machine, which he states will be more secure. More details can be found at cloud.oracle.com.
• Oracle executives gave a brief preview of the next generation of Oracle's Linux kernel, which is compatible with Red Hat Inc.'s Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). In June Oracle delivered Oracle Linux Release 6.1, which included the Linux 2.6.32 kernel. The company pointed out that they have no issue with Red Hat but they do not have Red Hat inside Oracle Linux and the company only tests its software and certifies it on its own Linux. Executives claim Oracle Linux has been benchmarked running 75 per cent faster than its Red Hat compatible kernel on certain (and unspecified) workloads and the new kernel will make it even faster as it scales. The Linux containers will have low overhead and the kernel will include a virtual switch for virtual machines and DTrace dynamic tracing. Executives also claim that there are 8,000 customers using the Oracle Linux, up from 5,000 customers a year ago at this time. 

Experton Group believes it remains to be seen if the reality of the new offerings is as robust, secure and unbreakable as Oracle's hype portrays them. Fusion has been a long time coming, which would make one hope that they are nearly bug-free and well-integrated. While there were customers that liked it, there were stories of the usual flaws and problems found with the beta versions of the new products. There were a number of promises made concerning the Oracle cloud but one that never appears is a service level commitment. Since there have been so many public cloud outages of late, and lost data, one would have thought Oracle would have wanted to show it was ahead of the pack, unless, of course, it isn't. IT executives should be very cautious about using the Oracle cloud without excellent availability, latency, performance, reliability, and security service level agreements. On the Linux front, Oracle continues unabated on its path to force users to employ an all-Oracle software stack and, if its customer counts are right, it is gaining traction. By not certifying new versions of RHEL, Oracle is using coercion to force customers to do its bidding. It makes one wonder how good the stack offering is when users are not given a choice. IT executives should be concerned about implementing Oracle's forced lock-in approach and should especially avoid it in mission-critical environments.