Love him or hate him, Oracle CEO, billionaire, America's Cup aficianado Larry Ellison is nothing if not interesting.…
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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 MoreOracle 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 MoreOracle server revenue slides (again)
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 MoreWhatever 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 MoreThis week in cloud: Amazon builds up; OpenStack staffs up; Oracle updates “faux” cloud
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 MoreEllison: “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 MoreOracle 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 MoreDilbert disses cloud (or at least cloudwashing)
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 MoreEllison 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 MoreTit for tat: Amazon offers free taste of Oracle database
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 MoreOracle 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 MoreShocker! 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 MoreOracle’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 MoreShhhh, 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 MoreOracle 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 MoreHP, 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 MoreThis 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 MoreOracle 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 MoreOracle 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 MoreOracle 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 MoreWhich 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 MoreOracle-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 MoreOracle 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.…
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