Mergers & Acquisitions on Ulitzer With only the ‘you may now kiss the bride’ custom to follow, the Oracle/Sun marriage (or dare I say Sun/Oracle) is now finally complete. After months of legal wrangling which has caused nothing but embarrassment and dwindled Sun’s stature within the market sphere, reports also came out that half of Sun's 27,000 staff will be made redundant. Thus initial indications are clear that Oracle, known for its past agnosticism to open source has an eye for the merger being based on maximizing profit. In the meantime Sun’s competitors are probably smiling wryly as the delay of the merger played into their immediate interests but what threats and challenges does this partnership now pose to the once great open source vendor which did so much for developing the tech and e-commerce industry. One thing which Oracle will most probably do is addres... (more)

Cloud Expo New York Call for Papers Now Open

Early Bird Savings Cloud Expo Cloud computing is a game changer. The cloud is disrupting traditional software and hardware business models by disrupting how IT service gets delivered. Entrepreneurial opportunities abound as this classic disruptive technology begins to proliferate, so it is no surprise that SYS-CON's industry-leading International Cloud Expo is going from strength to strength. The 5th International Cloud Expo, to be held April 19-21, 2010, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York, NY, announces that its Call for Papers is fast approaching. Topics on which submission are welcome include all aspects of providing or using massively scalable IT-related capabilities as a service using Internet technologies (see suggested examples below). Help plant your flag in the fast-expanding business opportunity that is The Cloud: submit your speaking propos... (more)

"Oracle is the Only Winner In the Sun-MySQL Deal," Claims Dvorak

"I'm close to being convinced that Oracle wanted to buy MySQL to kill the product, but knew it couldn't pull off the stunt itself. So it sent in a stooge to do the job." That, in a nutshell, is John Dvorak's (unqualified?) opinion on the $1BN deal last week. But his allegations of conspiracy are not cutting much mustard in the wider technology community, many of who regard his arguments as flawed. Dvorak's allegation rests on a financial premiss: "Sun cannot actually afford to spend a $1 billion on a company producing a mere $60 million in revenue and working outside its core competencies." From there, he assumes that the deal must have been masterminded (or does he mean actually funded?) by a bigger fish altogether: Oracle. Or, as Dvorak colorfully chooses to express it... "So who can afford it? Oracle, that's who. This deal stinks from top to bottom." Dvorak's inte... (more)

GlassFish & TopLink?

Ok I admit that in Ocotber I was a bit distracted but it totally amazed me when I found out last night that Oracle open sourced 'TopLink Essentials' as part of Glassfish. Looking at this the initial code was checked in in mid October, that is amazing. Why did I not hear about that? Seems like big news to me... But maybe it is just me, I first heard of TopLink when it was a Smalltalk product. Ah showing my age again... So is Oracle turing over a new leaf in thier approach to Open Source? I'm not sure because of stuff like this. If Top Link is part of the Glassfish community why are the EJB 3.0 extensions they are offering called out as such? Why not just be 'Glassfish extensions'. But that could just be a lack of community participation expierence on the part of who ever wrote that doco. If you dig into the FishEye link though none of the oracle classes have been rep... (more)

Major University IT Pro Running Oracle in a Virtual Environment Over an iSCSI SAN With SATA Drives

We really do have the greatest customers!  We love 'em.  In this interview, an IT administrator at a major university (the hat is not an indication by the way) talks about running out of storage and discovering iSCSI and EqualLogic.  This is actually my first video and my interviewing was atrocious, which led to a lot of choppy edits getting my noise out of the way.  Whatever, our customer tells a pretty interesting story of putting his reputation on the line when he reported that that performance with an EqualLogic SATA storage system was better than with high-speed  internal SCSI drives. He runs VMware, Oracle, SQL Server, Red Hat and SAS on top of his EqualLogic iSCSI SATA system.  ... (more)

3Par + Netapp = Inserv Good Idea!

3Par's storage combined with Netapp's file serving functionality.  All managed as a single pool of storage resources. Yes, its easy to see how this would be attractive to customers. More efficiency for storage managers.  To me, this multi-vendor approach to unified storage makes a lot more sense than single sourced unified storage.  Unified storage should not be defined as single source, but as consolidated management. You want to take advantage of product synergies without limitations imposed by a single vendor. This move is similar to one that EqualLogic made a short time ago when it worked with Microsoft Partner AMS Storage to combine EqualLogic iSCSI storage in a solution sold by AMS featuring Microsoft's Storage Server, This solution features file and block storage all managed as a single pool of storage resources. Its not hyperbole, we have customers that are a... (more)

The Evolution of Cloud Computing

The software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for delivering software, in which a software application is hosted and provided to customers via per user licensing, borrows many characteristics from both traditional corporate IT systems and the Internet. The fusion between the two generates compelling solutions to the many application management issues, such as system configuration, application performance, and availability, etc. that almost all IT organizations face. At the same time, the nature of SaaS delivery also creates new challenges for software vendors, particularly with regard to profitability, data center operations, and customer support. Overcoming these obstacles can make SaaS a much more strategic option for vendors looking to create competitive differentiation, drive customer volume and increase their revenue amid an increasingly crowded marketplace. This ar... (more)

Oracle Executive to Keynote on Rich Enterprise Applications at AJAX World

SYS-CON Events today announced that Oracle's Ashish Mohindroo (pictured) will deliver the Opening Keynote at the 7th International AJAX World Conference & Expo (ajaxworld.com), being held June 22-23 in New York City. In his session, "Breaking the Collaboration Barrier with Rich Enterprise Applications," Mohindroo - who launched and continues to lead the global Go-To-Market Initiatives for Oracle's SOA, Complex Event Processing (CEP), Business Process Management (BPM), Master Data Management (MDM), and Developer Tools product offerings and is a major driver behind Oracle's recognized leadership in SOA - will speak about REA and collaboration including Oracle's vision on how you can rapidly create collaboration tools, mashup existing applications, inject Portal capabilities into plain web apps, and build scalable Enterprise 2.0-style applications that render rich user ... (more)

The new buzz – Cloud Computing

It’s almost deafening! There is so much noise these days on the hottest buzzword – Cloud Computing. Larry Ellison derided that phrase by saying – it’s all water vapor. Marc Benioff brags about it incessantly via his Facebook posts, his new book Behind The Cloud, and at his annual user’s meeting last month called DreamForce.  Jeff Bezos of Amazon is given the default title of being the “Father of the Cloud”. Why? Well, he started the AWS (Amazon Web Services) way back in 2002 and quickly followed that with AWS – S3 (Simple Shared Storage – storage offered as a service),  AWS – EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud – CPU power offered as a service), AWS – SQS  (Queuing as a service), and AWS – SimpleDB (Database as a service). When asked about how he beat the big iron suppliers in offering Cloud infrastructure so early, this is what he said, -  “we had enough complexity insid... (more)

BCI Achieves Gold Partnership Status with Oracle Corporation

Libertyville, IL, April 25, 2012 --(PR.com)-- Bar Code Integrators, Inc. (BCI), a leading provider of bar code based data collection solutions, has achieved Gold Partner status in the Oracle Partner Network (OPN). BCI’s in-depth expertise and long history of providing complete integration solutions to hundreds of manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution companies were key factors in Oracle’s move to award this Gold partnership. BCI brings an experienced integration engineering team and strong partnerships with major hardware and software providers in the data collection space to the Oracle users. Motorola Solutions and Zebra Technologies are among the hardware partners that BCI has established strong business relationships with earning the highest status levels in their partner networks. “Oracle is excited to have BCI on board due to their extensive knowledge an... (more)

Scriptorium Publishing and JustSystems Highlight Advantages of DITA in the Enterprise

Microsoft Word is the default writing platform for many groups for one reason: almost everyone has it. For an enterprise that has been creating and maintaining unstructured content in Microsoft Word, transitioning to structured, topic-based authoring using the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) standard will actually create efficiencies when it comes to managing large volumes of content. By leveraging DITA, organizations can create, collaborate and reuse information that can be repurposed into the languages and formats needed to survive in a dynamic, competitive market. In an upcoming webinar, JustSystems, the largest independent software vendor in Japan and a worldwide leader in XML and information management technologies, and Scriptorium Publishing, provider of expert advice on how to develop, deploy and manage content, will introduce several methods for... (more)