It’s Larry’s world, we only live in it
Love him or hate him, Oracle CEO, billionaire, America’s Cup aficianado Larry Ellison is nothing if not interesting. Read more »
FWIW, Mark Hurd squelches Dell rumors
Oracle co-president Mark Hurd, in response to a question, indicates zero interest in becoming Dell CEO. Blackstone Group reportedly had Hurd on its short list of prospective picks should it win the Dell deal. Read more »
Oracle woes add up to more than a slacker salesforce
IT powers, including Oracle, face big time challenges as enterprise accounts reject old buying models and vendor lockin. Read more »
Oracle server revenue slides (again)
photo: Flickr / Peter Kaminski
Whoops. Oracle revenue from sales of Exadata, Exalogic, et. al fell again — 23 percent — in its third quarter compared to the year ago period. Read more »
Whatever happened to Oracle’s server business?
Oracle’s revenue from servers was down 18 percent year over year in the fourth quarter, according to Gartner and IDC. So far, the company’s high-stakes gamble on hardware isn’t paying off. Read more »
This week in cloud: Amazon builds up; OpenStack staffs up; Oracle updates “faux” cloud
photo: Flickr / akakumo
Amazon is reportedly on-board for a new data center build-out in Virginia; OpenStack Foundation preps for new year with board elections; another analyst declares Oracle’s cloud as a non-cloud. Read more »
Ellison: “Guys, hardware’s a great business, really!”
Despite the hype around its high-end engineered “Exa” systems, Oracle hardware revenue continued to swoon in the second quarter when it was off 23 percent year over year. But, CEO Larry Ellison said that the company has just about turned the corner. Read more »
Oracle buys Instantis, yet another “cloud” company
It never ends. Oracle says its latest acquisition — Instantis — will make it a bigger player in cloud-based project portfolio management. Instantis capabilities will be combined with Fusion and Primavera functions, the company said. Oracle competes with — who else? — SAP in this space. Read more »
Dilbert disses cloud (or at least cloudwashing)
photo: Flickr / Felix M. Cobos
When cartoonist Scott Adams decides that cloudwashing has become too much to take, maybe it’s time to give this annoying practice the boot. Sooooo … what do you say Oracle, HP, IBM, Microsoft? Can we agree to put the mindless use of the C-word on ice? Read more »
Ellison says no more big acquisitions. Yeah, right
Oracle CEO and acquirer-in-chief Larry Ellison told CNBC not to expect any big acquisitions in the near future. Instead Oracle will focus on its ambitious cloud plans, engineered systems and organic growth. We’ll see…. Read more »
Tit for tat: Amazon offers free taste of Oracle database
photo: Flickr/Will Merydith
The empire strikes back: Amazon Web Services adds the Oracle database — actually the whole RDS lineup — to its free usage tier. Anyone who doesn’t see Oracle’s new Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Amazon Web Services as potential competitors should probably look again. Read more »
Oracle cloud takes vendor lock-in up a notch
Oracle’s new clouds are a vehicle for selling more Oracle hardware and software into big accounts. It’s unclear how many of these big accounts — banks, manufacturers, insurance companies — really want to go all-in with Oracle in the cloud, however. Read more »
Shocker! Oracle takes on Amazon with all-Oracle-all-the-time cloud
Oracle’s promised new public and private clouds will run (spoiler alert) Oracle OS, Oracle VM, Oracle database and new Oracle Exadata X3 hardware. The company’s scale-up approach flies in the face of scale-out clouds espoused by market leaders like Amazon. Read more »
Oracle’s hardware hangover continues
Oracle’s still fighting to recover, recoup and profit from its $7.4 billion buyout of Sun Microsystems three years ago. In its first quarter, Oracle’s overall hardware business was off 24 percent year over year despite “triple-digit growth” in engineered systems like Exadata. Read more »
Shhhh, Larry Ellison’s about to tweet!
With all the cloud computing hubbub this week as Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Oracle gala events all vie for attention, it’s telling that most of the buzz centers on what exactly, Larry Ellison will tweet some time tomorrow. Read more »
Oracle seeks social net analytics in Collective Intellect buy
If there were any doubts that the gulf between consumery social networking sites and the stodgier world of enterprise software is narrowing, Oracle’s plan to buy Collective Intellect should erase them. Collective Intellect’s social intelligence solutions monitor consumer conversations on Facebook and Twitter. Read more »
HP, Oracle, Microsoft prep for cloudapalooza
Next week, legacy tech powers Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and Microsoft will vie for the spotlight as they set forth their cloud computing game plans at closely scheduled events. All three have prodigious resources and all three lag far behind cloud giant Amazon Web Services. Read more »
This week in the Oracle/Google trial: Week 1
One of the biggest trials in the recent history of the tech industry is in full swing, as Oracle and Google argue whether or not Google improperly used technology from Oracle’s Java when developing Android. Here’s what has happened during the first week of the trial. Read more »
Oracle faces big data, cloud, hardware triple whammy
For years, Oracle has wowed Wall Street with fat software margins: Large companies depending on Oracle relational databases pay what it takes to keep them up and running. It’s unclear whether Oracle can carry that dominance over into the Big Data era, however. Read more »
Oracle has a cloud computing secret
There’s a reason Larry Ellison called cloud computing “nonsense” and why he still won’t permit Amazon-style metered pricing for Oracle’s mainstream database and middleware. George Gilbert lets us in on the company’s expensive secret. Read more »
Oracle buys Taleo in a $1.9B response to SAP
Oracle is buying Taleo, a SaaS-based talent management company for $1.9 billion. Oracle said Taleo’s services will become part of the Oracle “public cloud.” Taleo could bring both more cloud credibility and more vertical expertise to Oracle’s broadening applications portfolio. Read more »
Which companies will EMC’s Project Lightning strike?
With its Project Lightning server-side flash cache, aka VFcache, EMC hopes to show itself as a forward-looking storage provider. But until it loses its big box, scale-up mentality, it won’t be much of a factor in webscale data centers that go for scale-out everything. Read more »
Oracle-HP: How things got this bad
Oracle and HP used to coexist quite well — People forget that the first Oracle Exadata ran on HP hardware. Then Oracle bought Sun and things went downhill fast. Public spats played out in CEO letters to The New York Times, and now court documents. Read more »
Oracle learns the dark side of hardware
Oracle is finally learning that the hardware business is not the software business. Revenue for the company’s Sun Microsystems-rooted servers fell 14 percent in the second quarter compared to the year-ago period. And gross margin on those hardware sales is returning to earth. Read more »
Who’s next on Oracle’s hit list?
So, what’s Oracle’s going to buy next? Here are five companies that might help the software giant fill in the check boxes on its public cloud, data analytics, management and infrastructure check list. Given Oracle’s bulging wallet, it doesn’t make sense to rule anything out. Read more »
Oracle’s big boxes are on the wrong side of history
To glimpse the future of the data stack, Oracle need look no further than its own backyard. Silicon Valley start-ups are embracing Hadoop, NoSQL data stores like MongoDB, and cloud platforms. Michael Driscoll of Metamarkets explains why Oracle should step up its game. Read more »
Oracle’s boxes more about integration than innovation
Oracle painted Exalytics data analytics and big data appliances as game changers. And they might be, for Oracle. But both high-end boxes are about Oracle taking existing IP assets that it acquired or open sourced, and layering them on Intel hardware and Infiniband pipes. Read more »
Cloud spat: Benioff cries foul over Oracle keynote cancellation
Battling CEOs: Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff tweeted that his counterpart at Oracle canceled Benioff’s big OpenWorld keynote. We can’t be sure because Oracle isn’t responding, but either way Salesforce.com probably just boosted attendance at its alternate event big-time. Read more »
Oracle Big Data Appliance stakes big claim
With its latest appliance, Oracle officially signaled its embrace of big data. Company execs said the appliance marries big data technologies with Oracle’s core 11G database and new Exalytics analytics appliance. The Big Data Appliance bundles Oracle NoSQL and an open-source Apache Hadoop distribution. Read more »
Oracle launches Exalytics, an appliance for big data
Exalytics, an appliance for near-real-time business intelligence applications, debuted at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 Sunday night. A key part of Oracle’s big data strategy, Exalytics layers in-memory and multi-dimensional database technology atop 40 Intel Xeon cores, all running in parallel, said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Read more »
Oracle needs some cloud computing mojo
Oracle’s cloud computing stance has evolved, to say the least, over the past few years. As the company preps for its annual Oracle OpenWorld mega-show in San Francisco next week, a huge question lingers: Does Oracle–and its CEO Larry Ellison–really “get” the cloud? Read more »
Six degrees of Larry Ellison [Infographic]
Some people just seem to have “it” — that spark that makes them seem like they have an inside track on everything and everyone worth knowing. There’s no question that, in the technology industry, Oracle co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison is one of those people. Read more »
For Oracle, Big Data Translates Into Big Bucks
Larry Ellison and Oracle aren’t interested when it comes to technology trends. They do their own thing, whether it’s mocking cloud companies or hiring deposed chief executives of rivals. Somehow, it all works out. Oracle reported blowout results for first quarter of 2011 on Friday. Read more »
HP vs Mark Hurd & Oracle: The Machiavellian Version
When it comes to ousted HP CEO Mark Hurd joining Oracle and HP’s subsequent lawsuit, Om speculates that this is a Machiavellian plot cooked up by Hurd and Larry Ellison to distract HP from business as usual, and settles in to watch the show. Read more »
Oracle's Ellison Rethinks Clouds as Economy Tumbles
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is rethinking his earlier disdain for software as a service and all things cloud, according to a report today in The Wall Street Journal. Maybe a dismal economy and a drop in Oracle sales are forcing him to change his position. The […] Read more »
Carbon Copy Cloner Makes Creating Bootable Backups Easy
One of the things I loved about the old Mac OS Classic was that to create a bootable disk, all you had to do was make a folder named System Folder, drag in System and Finder files and an Appearance Folder, then drag your bare-bones System […] Read more »
Fake Steve has Real Tip: Beware VCs with 'one pair of glasses' syndrome.
I’m daily consumer of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, mostly for its entertainment value, but there is also often real business intelligence there — even if, sometimes, you have to read between the lines and reverse-engineer huge doses of irony to get it. (We posted […] Read more »
Thoughts of the Day: from Oracle's Ellison
I had separate lunches this week with two serial founders, both of whom happened to cut their teeth working at the foot of that tyrannical, yet irrepressibly successful, nearly-but-never-richest-man-in-the-world software mogul whom everyone loves to hate only slightly less respectfully than Bill Gates: Oracle founder Larry […] Read more »
Are you a narcissist? Let's hope so…
Another great post from VC Fred Wilson, this one on one of our favorite topics: leadership. Fred wrote Wednesday of a discussion he had recently with a colleague about “the classic visionary leader entrepreneur.” Their conversation turned to Sigmund Freud, the 19th century father of psychology, […] Read more »
Oracle Finally Gets BEA
Turns out Oracle really wanted BEA Systems after all, enough to pay a 24 percent premium over Tuesday’s closing price for BEA shares. The database giant said today it would pay $19.38 a share in cash, which values the deal at $8.5 billion including the $1.3 […] Read more »
