Open-Xchange has around 70 million users through its contracts with roughly 80 providers such as 1&1 Internet and Strato. Its OX App Suite takes the form of a virtual desktop of sorts, that lets users centralize their email and file storage accounts and view all sorts of documents through a unified portal. However, as of an early April release it will also include OX Text, a non-destructive, collaborative document editor that rivals Google Docs, and that has an interesting heritage of its own.

The team that created the HTML5- and JavaScript-based OX Text includes some of the core developers behind OpenOffice, the free alternative to Microsoft Office that passed from Sun Microsystems to Oracle before morphing into LibreOffice. The German developers we’re talking about hived off the project before LibreOffice happened, and ended up getting hired by Open-Xchange.

“To them it was a once in a lifetime event, because we allowed them to start from scratch,” Open-Xchange CEO Rafael Laguna told me. “We said we wanted a fresh office productivity suite that runs inside the browser. In terms of the architecture and principles for the product, we wanted to make it fully round-trip capable, meaning whatever file format we run into needs to be retained.”

This is an extremely handy formatting and version control feature. Changes made to a document in OX Text get pushed through to Open-Xchange’s backend, where a changelog is maintained. “Power” Word features such as Smart Art or Charts, which are not necessarily supported by other productivity suites, are replaced with placeholders during editing and are there, as before, when the edited document is eventually downloaded. As the OX Text blurb says, “OX Text never damages your valuable work even if it does not understand it”.

“[This avoids] the big disadvantage of anything other than Microsoft Office,” Laguna said. “If you use OpenOffice with a .docx file, the whole document is converted, creating artefacts, then you convert it back. That’s one of the major reasons not everyone is using OpenOffice, and the same is true for Google Apps.”

OX Text will be available as an extension to OX App Suite, which also includes calendaring and other productivity tools. However, it will also come out as a standalone product under both commercial licenses – effectively support-based subscriptions for Open-Xchange’s service provider customers – and open-source licenses, namely the GNU General Public License 2 and Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License, which will allow free personal, non-commercial use.

You can find a demo of App Suite, including the OX Text functionality, here, and there’s a video too:

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On the company’s second quarter earnings call in December, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said Oracle’s $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems made it “a leader in the highly profitable Engineered Systems segment of the hardware business.”  In his view, that’s a better, more lucrative place to be than in “low-margin undifferentiated products like commodity X86 servers.” Leave that race to the bottom to the Dells of the world, he seems to say. (In fact at one point during Oracle’s Sun acquisition, he actually did say that.)

Here’s the problem, since it entered the hardware business, Oracle hasn’t sold enough engineered systems to make up for lost sales of lower-end machines, according to third-party researchers. Its hardware revenue and unit share is headed south.

For the fourth calendar quarter of 2012,  Oracle server revenue  was down 18 percent year over year according to both Gartner and IDC. Meanwhile, as GigaOM’s Jordan Novet reported last week, the “other” server vendors — companies like Quanta and Wistron – saw their aggregate revenue rise nearly 22 percent in the fourth quarter compared to the year-ago period.

In units, the “other” category saw 35 percent growth. These are the types of servers that sell into huge web-scale data centers run by Facebook and Amazon. This is not a new thing: In the third quarter of 2012, Gartner numbers showed Oracle’s server revenue off 22.5 percent while “other” servers revenue was up 27 percent. Oracle’s own figures reinforce this narrative. In its third quarter, ending in November 30,  2012, Oracle hardware systems revenue fell 23 percent to $734 million from $953 million for the year-ago period.

The IDC findings are below. Obviously, Oracle sees huge potential in these high-end boxes — Nomura Securities’ analyst Rick Sherlund said “the Exaseries of servers are growing about 100 percent, but that has not been enough to offset the loss of the other business yet.” The question is how patient Oracle is prepared to be.

I’ve reached out for comment and will update this if one is forthcoming.  Update:  An Oracle spokeswoman declined to comment, citing the company’s quiet period before its next earnings report. Here’s the thing, while Oracle regroups and repositions its server business, the trajectory for “other” servers is way up and Oracle keeps heading in the other direction. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s any indication of a change on Oracle’s third quarter earnings call March 20.

This story was updated at 9:40 a.m. PDT with a statement from Oracle.

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But given that hardware revenue fell 23 percent to $734 million from $954 million for the year-ago quarter, that optimism seems a tad forced. Oracle’s hardware business revolves around its high-end Exadata, Exalogic and Exalytics “engineered systems” and Sun T-4 systems. The decline in that business, as Nomura Securities Analyst Rick Sherlund  pointed out, was “worse than the low end of guidance.” Last quarter, Oracle saw a similar sickly performance, with hardware revenue off 24 percent year over year.

On the earnings call, Ellison said engineered systems saw a 70 percent sequential growth in bookings. “We are just about finished with the downsizing phase and the transformation of that business [and are] about to start growing our hardware business,” he told analysts on the earnings call Tuesday night. “In Q3 we’ll be turning the corner and in Q4, we expect the top line growth to go along with continually improving margins.”

In the past Oracle has been able to manage big acquisitions with nary a hiccup. But those were software acquisitions and hardware is a new beast for the company. Plus it’s a beast without the rich margins of databases and middleware. To be fair, there is a natural constituency for these big Oracle data center appliances — big Oracle database and financial applications shops in financial services, retail and other verticals. And there are lots of those companies.

The CIO of a large bank told me that his company has bought several Exadata machines in the past year. The initial, admittedly high, upfront cost of those systems, was offset by a few things. First, the bank is able to consolidate more of its existing Oracle workloads on fewer machines. And it no longer needs an army of database admins, storage experts and networking people to man them. Plus, it already owned all the Oracle software it needs to run — so there was little in the way of additional software license fees.

But his situation just proves that Oracle sales are still led by software. Good thing software was a prettier picture this quarter. Revenue from new software license and “cloud subscriptions” grew 18 percent to $2.4 billion from $2 billion for the year-ago quarter.

Since Oracle bought Sun, co-presidents Safra Catz and  Mark Hurd have repeatedly said that these engineered systems are highly profitable — that may be true. But it’s also true that hardware, is very different from software, and it’s not clear that Oracle gets that yet.

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While other companies make similar claims, Bidgely’s big selling point is that the company says it can take smart meter data, utility data or energy data from a Zigbee-based router in the home, and be able to tell which appliances are consuming what amount of power in a home in real time without having extra hardware or sensors on each plug or appliance. Other companies that focus on this — which people in the industry call appliance-level “energy disaggregation” — need the consumer to buy smart plugs and stick them on every appliance and outlet. That makes these type of hardware-intensive options basically a non-starter for average consumers.

Bidgely says it is the first company out there that can detect appliance consumption patterns without additional hardware and sensors. For example, if the freezer is left open, or a pool pump is old and not running efficiently, it can determine that with its algorithms, explained Bidgely’s co-founder and CEO Abhay Gupta. Gupta previously worked at smart grid company Grid Net, energy company Echelon, and Sun Microsystems.

Gupta said Bidgely has been able to create these types of algorithms first partly because it was able to obtain a significant number of Google Power Meter users after Google shut down its Power Meter application in the summer of 2011. Some of these Power Meter users were using TED real time energy gadgets, and Google Power Meter had its own algorithms to discover when appliance were being used, so Bidgely was able to spend over a year crunching these detailed data sets and creating its own algorithms.

Data deluge

Bidgely gets its data from a few sources, each of which have their own limitations. Gupta told me that through the 8 years that he’s spent working on energy data companies, he knew what was available and wasn’t available from different data sets.

Utilities in some states are working on a Department of Energy-developed initiative called Green Button, which opens up smart meter energy consumption data to third party developers like Bidgely. That data is generally energy consumption data from 15-minute or 1-hour intervals. The problem though is that not all of the utilities in the U.S. are aggressively embracing the Green Button initiative (though California’s utilities are). Also, Green Button data is not always real time and can be a day-old — that makes it far less useful.

If a consumer is one of the few that has bought a router or gateway that connects to the smart meter via a Zigbee wireless connection, then Bidgely can use the data off the router or gateway in real time. Bidgely is working with hardware partners like Digi and Rainforest for this type of hardware (see gadget to the right). Utilities also have these types of Zigbee-connected device projects in the works, and a small number of them are starting to open up that Zigbee energy data to third parties.

Finally, utilities that aren’t opening up their energy data via Green Button or Zigbee device projects can connect with Bidgely directly. But then Bidgely has to connect with the individual utilities and convince them to trust Bidgely with their customers’ data. It’s not an impossible task, and Gupta said it has three trials that will start soon with utilities.

One reason utilities might want to work with Bidgely is that utilities are looking for ways that consumers can benefit from smart meters, as there’s been some backlash from consumer advocate groups — and consumers themselves — that smart meters are only benefiting the utilities. Startup Opower has managed to win over utility customers for its first generation of energy billing services.

But Opower’s service can reduce consumer energy consumption by 1.5 percent to 2 percent — compared with other services like Bidgely that are aiming for far higher reductions. Aggressive utilities are looking to move to the next-level of energy efficiency services.

The applications

Once Bidgely gets the energy data it needs, it has created a recommendation engine that uses the data to give its customers real-time advice and instructions for how to reduce their energy consumption. These could be energy-saving techniques — like get a new pool pump or close your fridge — but they could also be non-energy specific services about the home. For example, closing your fridge can be helpful just to save the food inside from thawing.

The recommendation engine uses cloud-based large machine learning techniques to deliver personalized recommendations, and also incorporates more big data sets into the engine like social, weather, and demographics. Bidgely uses No-SQL database techniques.

Other companies that are relying on algorithms, and big data to reduce consumer energy consumption include Nest Labs, C3, Opower, Silver Spring Networks, EnergyHub, Ecofactor and more.

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For a company that’s spent an estimated $45 billion on companies ranging from PeopleSoft (in 2004 for $10.3 billion)  and Sun Microsystems (in 2009 for $7.4 billion)  to more recent buys of Taleo (this year for $1.9 billion) and SelectMinds, (deal still pending, terms not disclosed) that non-news is kind of newsy. (Here’s Oracle’s pretty impressive official list of “strategic” acquisitions.) Oracle has also made a raft of smaller acquisitons like Vitrue to bolster it’s social networking expertise.

Speaking to CNBC Tuesday night, Ellison waved off a potential acquisition of NetApp, telling Maria Bartiromo — who came out to Oracle OpenWorld to do the honors —  that he now wants to focus on organic growth, cloud computing and engineered systems — the “Exa” boxes that will form the basis of Oracle’s cloud.  He did not, however, rule out more big spending in a few year’s time.

Here’s the thing: many people take what Ellison says with a grain of salt — but he’s also been known to follow up — ruthlessly on some promises. At Oracle OpenWorld a few years back he warned erstwhile big partners like Veritas to “get off his lawn” and clearly signaled his intent to compete with them with Oracle’s own offerings. In that case, he was true to his word.

As for this statement, stay tuned. If rival SAP continue it’s targeted buying binge  – a la SuccessFactors  – I think Ellison could change course pretty quickly. However Ellison has now picked a pretty big fight with Amazon in public cloud infrastructure so he’d better stick to his knitting in cloud.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Oracle_Photos_Screenshots

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Cumulogic CEO Mike Soby

Cumulogic, a company with strong Sun Microsystems and Java DNA, wants to make its technology the foundation of enterprise-class PaaSes to be offered by telcos, hosting companies and other service providers.

The two-year old company started out building a managed public PaaS that it would sell to developers, but changed course, said Mike Soby, a CA veteran who joined the company as CEO in February. Now the idea is to be more an arms dealer to service providers that want to offer an enterprise-friendly Java PaaS to their customers.

“We want to be in the software business, not the service provider business.” On Wednesday, that PaaS infrastructure software, which has been in beta for some time, is generally available.

With company co-founders Laura Ventura, Rajesh Ramchandani both veterans of Sun — and with Java super-star developer James Gosling on the board of advisors, Cumulogic can boast strong Java cred. “You can’t have an enterprise PaaS without Java,” Soby told me in an interview. The third co-founder, Sandeep Patni was the application infrastructure lead for Goldman Sachs’ risk technology group. This is a group that gets Java and gets the enterprise.

In the field, Cumulogic’s foundational software will face off against Red Hat’s OpenShift — a PaaS with Java roots that will also attack the service provider market and VMware’s Cloud Foundry, a multi-language and multi-framework PaaS that VMware is pitching as a PaaS for all clouds — although Cloud Foundry does not, as yet, support J2EE applications. There are also other Java-focused PaaSes out there including CloudBees.

Cumulogic, based in Cupertino, Calif., addressed the knotty issue of multi-cloud support claiming it can manage applications on private and public clouds including CloudStack, OpenStack, Eucalyptus, VMware and Amazon is talking with most of the major cloud and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers about the product. It says it has already signed a few, including Contegix, a cloud service provider, is already aboard.

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U.S. Venture Partners led the round, and USVP partner Rick Lewis is joining the board of Denver-based Wayin. USVP joins an interesting roster of investors, including enterprise software company TIBCO; Silicon Valley law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati; former head of Microsoft Business Solutions and McNealy classmate Doug Burgum; Hollywood producer Burt Sugarman; and sportscaster Jim Gray.

As McNealy told GigaOM late last year, it’s easier to raise money if you have a good rolodex. Starting Wayin “was actually a little easier probably than it should have been,” he said. Early on, the startup was able to rake in $6.3 million in investment without even tapping the VC community, McNealy said at the time.

At launch time, GigaOM’s Ryan Lawler described the service as a website and mobile application that let users easily create and vote on polls, follow other users and share opinions. Frequent users get points for creating and voting on polls.

Clearly, social networks — especially Twitter and Facebook — are hugely influential. Companies pay good money to analyze and parse these streams of data to perform sentiment analysis, which is something McNealy has acknowledged Wayin intends to cash in on. Whether or not Wayin can become a data source on the level of Facebook or Twitter, however, is up in the air.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Eddie Awad.

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Innovation was never Sun’s problem, but monetizing those innovations was. Evidence of Sun’s innovative streak is scattered throughout Silicon Valley and the greater IT world in the form of former employees who went on to do big things after leaving the company.

Here’s what they’ve been up to. Maybe we’ll talk about Facebook the same way 30 years from now.

Andy Bechtolsheim (co-founder): Arista Networks (founder and chief development officer)

Bill Joy (co-founder): Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (partner)

Vinod Khosla (co-founder): Khosla Ventures (partner)

Scott McNealy (co-founder): WayIn (founder and chairman)

Bryan Cantrill: Joyent (VP of engineering)

Alfred Chuang: BEA Systems (co-founder, president and CEO); Magnet Systems (founder and CEO)

James Gosling (co-creator, Java): Liquid Robotics (chief software architect)

Marc Fleury: JBoss (founder)

Gary Lauterbach: SeaMicro (CTO)

Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem: Nvidia (co-founders)

Peter Norvig: Google (director of research)

Greg Papadopoulos (EVP and CTO): New Enterprise Associates (partner)

Radia Perlman: Intel (Intel Fellow)

Eric Schmidt (CTO): Google (chairman, former CEO)

Jonathan Schwartz (president and CEO): CareZone (founder and CEO)

Marc Tremblay: Microsoft (distinguished engineer)

Bill Vass (president and COO, Sun Microsystems Federal): Liquid Robotics (president and CEO)

Ed Zander (president and COO): Motorola (chairman and CEO, 2004-08)

Image courtesy of Flickr user viHannes.

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Cray's XK6 supercomputer

It looks like Oracle has some competition when it comes to selling big iron for big data. On Wednesday, Cray, the Seattle-based company best known for building some of the world’s fastest supercomputers, said it’s getting into the big data game. A new division within Cray, called YarcData, will leverage Cray’s experience working within data-intensive environments for customers such as Boeing in order to woo large-enterprises with big data needs.

Cray was short on details in a press release announcing the new division, but new YarcData SVP and GM Arvind Parthasarathi, formerly of Informatica is quoted saying, “YarcData is the nexus of the world’s most advanced technologies from Cray being applied to solve the world’s most challenging Big Data problems.” The natural leap is that Cray will design parallel-processing systems capable of incredible data throughput — something already required in the supercomputing space, where incredible processing capacity would be wasted without a steady data stream — but that will support today’s popular big data tools (e.g., Hadoop, analytic databases and predictive analytics software).

This type of system could be very valuable for organizations such as banks and intelligence agencies that want to run big data workloads as fast as possible — even process streaming data in real time– and the deep pockets to pay for Cray’s presumably pricey systems. Despite the fact that big-data framework Hadoop gained popularity in part because it’s designed to run on commodity hardware, there’s always a place for high-end hardware when milliseconds really do matter, and there’s something to be said for pre-configured systems that take the guesswork out of building a big data environment, as I explained recently in a piece for GigaOM Pro (sub req’d).

Cray isn’t alone in pushing this high-performance, enterprise-focused big data vision, though. Oracle made a splash in October when it announced a Big Data Appliance that marries Hadoop, R, NoSQL and other technologies to the high-end hardware Oracle obtained when it bought Sun Microsystems. IBM also has an extensive big data software portfolio complemented by a systems business that includes supercomputers, as well. And although it doesn’t have an HPC pedigree like the others, Teradata has years of experience building systems optimized for analytics.

Cray won’t likely become a household name in the big data world, and its notoriously secretive customers might never divulge what they’re using its analytics products for, but there certainly is a market — however small — for super-big, super-fast and super-expensive data.

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