Oracle … The Toast Of The Town

I was in San Francisco this past week, attending Oracle’s OpenWorld. Over 40,000 IT guys and gals were in attendance. And I have to say that Oracle did a masterful job of orchestrating and coordinating this mass of humanity who had converged on San Francisco. I was fortunate enough to be attending as part of the “Leadership Circle”, made up of my peers.

Over the course of the past week, Oracle posted stronger than expected earnings – Net Income for the quarter rose to $1B, yes $1 with nine zeros, and in the same week, in a matter of a few days sent the IT world into a whirlwind with the introduction of an Oracle Database engine. Wowww!!!! 

This income stream will keep the Oracle acquisition juggernaut rolling and rolling (in case you did not already know … they spent $34B to acquire 50 companies over the course of the past few years) … IBM, Microsoft, Google beware of this not so gentle giant … they sure know how to scour the landscape for tasty “IT morsels”, swallow them, spit out what they do not want (not much of that), and continue to hit their stride whilst they digest … that is what I would call sublime execution. 

Interestingly these acquisitions positions Oracle to ride herd for years to come … they offer depth of applications suitable for numerous vertical markets, and some. Couple this with Netsuite, the people who offer on-demand services for application software, and one has a formidable offering. Now before you start blasting that Netsuite is not an Oracle company, you would be correct, however it is worth noting that Mr Ellison is one of their early investors. 

The introduction of a database machine is interesting to say the least. They have not gone out on a limb, for their collaboration with HP one can sigh with relief that this will not be a distraction to their focus on continuing to offer “integrated” apps from the breadth of their offerings. There are some software companies who have acquired a large number of companies but have yet to offer anything meaningful with respect to integration especially in the financial applications marketplace. 

I am bemused with this new buzzword, “cloud computing”, for it is simply putting a new dress on “ASP”, on-demand, “client-server”, the twist here being that this is offered via the Web.

I participated in two panel discussions; met with some very interesting people, one of them being Gayle Carpentier of TechSoup.org and her boss. They do a terrific job at Techsoup.org, providing other non-profits in the US with access to software and hardware at highly discounted prices.   

It was a worthwhile stay, of 2.5 days, in San Fran.