Latest News from Oracle Developer's Journal

Larry Ellison Buys Hawaiian Airline

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 03:00:00 EST

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Wednesday gave the world another lesson in how to spend like a billionaire. He announced that he’s bought Island Air, the airline that makes hops between the Hawaiian Islands, to go with his purchase last year of almost all of Lanai, the resort island off Maui, for a reported $500 million–$600 million. Apparently the airline has been restructuring and Larry’s acquisition is a job-saving Godsend.

Oracle OpenWorld 2012: BIG-IP APM Integration – Oracle Access Manager

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 21:47:00 EDT

It’s an All-Akker video week at #OOW. I again get F5 Business Development Solution Architect, Chris Akker on camera – this time to show the configuration integration between BIG-IP Access Policy Manager and Oracle Access Manager. In just a few admin GUI clicks, you can add either solution to an existing deployment.

Oracle OpenWorld 2012: BIG-IP Integration with Product Development

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 21:30:00 EDT

I chat with Dennis Zhou, Manager – Product Development, to get an interesting, inside scoop on how F5′s PD team tackles integrating BIG-IP with other vendor’s solutions, like Oracle Access Manager.

Oracle OpenWorld 2012: BIG-IP ASM and Oracle Database Firewall Integration

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 19:44:00 EDT

Peter Silva meets with F5 Business Development Solution Architect, Chris Akker to show the BIG-IP ASM integration with Oracle’s Database Firewall. A layered, defense-in-depth approach along with the contextual information needed for digital forensic gathering. Security best practices at its best.

Oracle OpenWorld 2012: BIG-IP Solutions for Oracle Enterprise Manager

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 21:19:00 EDT

I hang with one of my most frequent and favorite guests, F5 Business Development Solution Architect, Chris Akker. Akker takes us through how to deploy Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c on a BIG-IP using an F5 iApp along with explaining how BIG-IP GTM can help Oracle Deployments with resiliency.

Oracle OpenWorld 2012: Gimmie 90 Seconds

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 19:08:00 EDT

I corner my next contestant on the new game show called ‘Gimme 90 Seconds’ where guests have to explain how various BIG-IP solutions solve IT challenges. Our second F5 contestant Ron Carovano, Manager, Business Development wins the coveted F5 squeeze ball by successfully answering how F5′s BIG-IP solutions optimizes, secures and delivers Oracle applications.

Ellison Buys His Own Hawaiian Island

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 06:00:00 EDT

Oracle CEO has bought 98% of Lana’i, one of the Hawaiian islands, the sixth largest one, in fact. The governor of Hawaii Neil Abercrombie announced the transaction Wednesday.

Oracle Misses Badly, Spooks Everybody

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 22:49:00 EST

Oracle zigged when it was expected to zag Tuesday and came in with a nasty fiscal Q2 miss that caused its stock price to buckle close to 10% after-hours for fear the results are a harbinger of the broad-based tech slowdown everybody’s afraid of given the newspaper headlines, especially out of Europe. Oracle in its conference call never once said it was, claiming instead that Q2 was a one-off event and that “short of a global meltdown” Q3 “won’t be a repeat.” Obviously there was a struggle to close deals in Q2, which ended with the hateful November. Ellison, Catz and Hurd are three pretty slick articles, still it’s hard to believe that the company didn’t already have the management controls in place to monitor last-minute approvals but that’s what Catz said. Approvals came through – lurchingly and apparently with more, higher-up signatures than they used to need – and Oracle has had to figure out how to deal with that wrinkle going forward. Apparently any deals missed are expected to close this quarter. Both its Q2 revenue and earnings were short of consensus. It reported earning 54 cents a share, up 6%, on revenues of $8.79 billion, up 2% year-over-year, when the Street thought it would do 57 cents on $9.23 billion. GAAP income was up 17% to $2.2 billion or 43 cents a share. Unfortunately Oracle had guided to revenue of $8.99 billion-$9.34 billion. It said new licenses were up 2% to $2 billion when it had guided to an increase of 6%-16% and updates and product support was up 9% to $4 billion. It’s supposedly not seeing a slowdown in Europe. It even said the US public sector was pretty good. CRM is supposed to be up close to 20%. Most of everything else, however, looks off. Hardware was down 14% to $953 million – when it was supposed to be flat to down 5% – and that’s despite what Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said was accelerated sales of engineered systems. According to him “Exadata growth was well over 100% compared to last year, and Exalogic grew more than 100% on a sequential basis. We shipped our first SPARC SuperCluster in Q2 and expect to begin deliveries of our Exalytics system and the Oracle Big Data Appliance in Q3.” Evidently the product transition from the T3 to T4 Sparc chip was a hold-up since it requires a brand new system and people aren’t going to buy outdated equipment so late in the cycle. In addition, Oracle could only deliver a few SuperClusters since they only became available at the end of the quarter. But Hurd maintains that Oracle pipeline is as full as it’s ever been, with Exalogic ramping faster than the Exadata machine, something he’s said before. Larry said 200 Exadata/logic machines were sold in Q2 and prophesized that 300 would be sold this quarter and 400 in Q4. By then they’ll be a billion-dollar business that he said will double next fiscal year. Bernstein ace analyst Toni Sacconaghi noticed that wasn’t quite as many as previously forecast and Ellison had to admit he was right. Oracle might not triple its installed base, maybe it’ll only be up 2.5x, Ellison said, but “It’s still spectacular.” Oracle’s GAAP operating margin was 35%; its non-GAAP margin was 45%, which it’s pleased enough with, and it claims it should return to pre-Sun margins soon. Oracle’s workforce was up 1,700 salesmen in the first half. Co-president Mark Hurd said in a statement, “We believe that this increase in our field organization combined with innovative new products like Fusion Cloud ERP and Cloud CRM will enable solid organic growth in the second half of this year.” Oracle exceeded estimates in the four previous quarters and it’s going to have tough compare this quarter because last year was sensational. It’s forecasting total revenues will be up 3%-7% this quarter. That would work out to somewhere between $9 billion and $9.42 billion. It said new software licenses would be flat to up 10% and hardware down 5% to 15%. Adjusted earning should be 56 cents-59 cents. The Street had it down for 58 cents on $9.46 billion. To console investors Oracle said it could buy back another $5 billion worth of stock at some point. It’s got $31 billion in the bank.

Building Enterprise Class Oracle Databases on Amazon Web Services

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 05:30:00 EST

AWS is built on commodity hardware and it is software virtual machine based. AWS documentation states that: It's inevitable that EC2 instances will fail, and you need to plan for it. As a rule of thumb, you should be a pessimist when designing architecture for the cloud. That means that putting your Oracle databases on AWS cloud should be accompanied with carefully thought out fault tolerance and DR procedures. Usual practice of performing Oracle database backups should be carefully implemented and monitored. Databases can be backed up efficiently and conveniently to AWS S3 disk based storage using RMAN/S3 MML interface. This includes lower, non-production environments, to reduce rebuild time and preserve database side structures - tables and stored procedures.

cVidya Achieves Oracle Exadata Ready Status

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 11:37:00 EST

cVidya’s MoneyMap® Version 6.5 has achieved Oracle Exadata Ready status through Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). This will significantly assist clients with the extreme performance available only with Oracle Exadata Database Machine. This announcement demonstrates that cVidya has fully tested and supports MoneyMap Version 6.5 on Oracle Exadata Database Machine, including Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and Oracle Linux. This milestone follows cVidya's recent participation in the OPN Forum opening keynote session at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 where cVidya's executives highlighted the benefits of the Oracle Exastack Program and cVidya's achievement of Oracle Exadata Ready status. cVidya is also on track to achieve Oracle Exastack Optimized status as part of the Oracle Exastack Program. Third party applications that are Oracle Exastack Optimized signal to customers that they have been tested and tuned to achieve optimal performance, scalability and reliability.

Oracle Database and Big Data: A Powerful Combination

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 14:57:00 EDT

Ever wondered how it is possible that Google searches through so much data with such speed and precision ? Part of the answer is MapReduce, Google technology for processing and generating large data sets. Apache Hadoop is open source software that can process petabytes of data in parallel on hundreds and thousands of commodity hardware nodes. It was inspired by Google MapReduce. Oracle corporation is acknowledging the power of Oracle/Hadoop combination by announcing Big Data Appliance - essentially Hadoop/Oracle database software/Oracle hardware bundle, to be available next year.

Oracle Database Upgrades Faster and Safer in Amazon Web Services

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 15:59:00 EDT

Oracle database upgrades are a stressful exercise. Normally you need to backup production database, upgrade database software, then run database scripts that will upgrade dictionary. Once it is all done and success is confirmed you can start using upgraded database. If something goes wrong then you rely on backups to restore to a previous state. In other words, there is complete dependency on backups and restore success if things go wrong. AWS gives us possibility to quickly and cheaply create new database instances where an upgrade can be tested. We can also instantly create completely new database environment as replacement for regular backups during actual upgrade. This environment is ready to take over the role of main database in case upgrade fails, thus sparing us time and stress of restore process. Last but not least, we can quickly commission and decommission as many servers as we need to comfortably complete upgrade exercise. This is usually not easily achieved in normal circumstances where new servers and storage provisioning requires long lead times and lengthy discussions with various departments.

AWS Announced New Scaling and Availability Features for Oracle Databases

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 11:57:17 EDT

Amazon RDS is already offering Multi-AZ deployments and Read Replicas for MySQL databases. We are looking at what feature will look like when released for Oracle databases, how it will be implemented and what best possible uses are. Oracle database is offering a rich set of HA options in a non-Amazon world - active/passive clusters based on operating system failover capabilities (for example, IBM HACMP), active/active instances - Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters), Oracle Data Guard (physical and logical standby databases located in remote data center). Amazon Web Services RDS (Relational Database Service) is already offering multi-AZ deployments for MySQL, soon to be released for Oracle databases too.

Which Cloud Service Provider Should Host Your Oracle Databases?

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 05:00:00 EDT

We are looking at what makes Amazon Web Services the likely choice of IaaS Cloud Service Providers for your enterprise data center needs. Big shift towards Cloud environment has started. It is now clear that this change is similar in magnitude to the shift from mainframe to client-server computing two decades ago. Amazon Web Services is the pioneer and market leader in Cloud computing space. Other vendors are playing catch up and do not come close to the breadth and scale of AWS offerings. Services and features Amazon provides are quite extensive and cover many of the enterprise-class computing needs. APIs and command line interfaces are available for each service, which makes scripting and automation achievable. Documentation is publicly available and there is large ecosystem of organizations and individuals proficient in use of AWS.

Enterprise Class Oracle Databases in the Public Cloud?

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:36:00 EDT

Most of enterprise class shops today run their Oracle databases on either HP-UX, AIX or Sun OS operating systems. Is it possible to move these databases to the public cloud, and, if so, who are providers who can help with such a move? Public cloud services are closely related to virtualization i.e. usage of various flavors of popular Virtual Machines (VMware, XEN). VMs are one of major ingredients giving cloud services such great characteristics as scalability, on-demand instant provisioning and deprovisioning of resources. Virtual Machines are able to run many guest operating systems - mostly flavors of Linux, Windows and Open Solaris. Most public cloud providers are not using or supporting proprietary HP, IBM and Sun Virtual Machines that host HP-UX, IBM AIX and Sun OS operating systems. Majority of public cloud providers use either VMware or XEN Virtual Machines i.e. they only support Linux/Windows/Open Solaris operating systems. That leaves you with two options if you are considering moving your HP-UX, AIX or Sun OS based Oracle databases to the public cloud.

Oracle OpenWorld 2011: The Video Outtakes

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 11:33:00 EDT

My guests and I (mostly me) share the collection of flubs, scrubs and otherwise unusable material from the Oracle OpenWorld 2011 videos. What better way to spend a few minutes on a Friday than watching someone else screw up.

Oracle OpenWorld 2011: The Wrap Up

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 23:05:00 EDT

Thanks to everyone involved with this week’s videos – Andy, Chris, Matt, Ron, Keith, Calvin and Jonathan. I try to recall all the various things we covered this week and wrap up Oracle Open World 2011.

Oracle OpenWorld 2011: Interview with F5’s Ron Carovano

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 21:48:00 EDT

Peter Silva talks with F5’s Ron Carovano Sr. Business Development Mgr about the F5's acceptance into the Oracle Exastack Ready program. The Oracle Exastack Program enables partners to deploy their applications with a complete, integrated, and cloud-ready infrastructure that will help them accelerate innovation, unlock new features and functionality, and deliver faster, more reliable solutions.

Oracle OpenWorld 2011: Interview with F5′s Keith Gillum

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 21:25:00 EDT

I interviewed F5's Keith Gillum, Product Manager for BIG-IP WAN Optimization Manager (WOM). We discuss WANOp, latency sensitive networks and applications, database replication and other bandwidth challenges.

Oracle OpenWorld 2011: Interview with F5’s Calvin Rowland

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 20:22:00 EDT

I meet with Calvin Rowland, F5 VP - Application Partner Program, about the F5 & Oracle relationship, our solution partnership and a few other gems from this always fun, energetic and interesting guest.

Interview with F5′s Andy Oehler

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 22:47:00 EDT

I chatted with Andy Oehler, F5 Product Manager about BIG-IP Access Policy Manager, the integration with Oracle Access Manager and what APM brings to BIG-IP.

F5 ARX & Oracle ZFS Storage

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 22:54:00 EDT

I met with F5′s ARX Solution Engineer Matt Quill for a F5 ARX and Oracle ZFS Storage along with chatting with Oracle’s David Wallace.

BIG-IP WANOp & Oracle GoldenGate

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 22:16:00 EDT

I found F5 Solution Architect Chris Akker to discuss F5′s WAN OP Manager and how it helps accelerate Oracle GoldenGate Software.

Another Whopper From Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 01:32:00 EDT

Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch continues to insist that Autonomy was never 'shopped' to Oracle. But now at least he remembers and admits to meeting with Oracle President Mark Hurd and Doug Kehring, Oracle's head of M&A, this past April. But CEO Lynch insists that it was a purely technical meeting, limited to a 'lively discussion of database technologies.' Interesting, but not true.

Oracle Has Good Numbers

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 05:45:00 EDT

Oracle narrowly vaulted Wall Street’s expectations Tuesday when it reported its first fiscal quarter. Its results encouraged people to think budgets aren’t in lockdown mode. Revenues were up 12% to $8.37 billion returning a non-GAAP EPS of 48 cents a share, up 14%, against estimates of 46 cents on $8.35 billion. On a GAAP basis EPS was 36 cents, up 36%, for a total net of $1.84 billion. Although there were no large deals, new software license revenues, a key metric, were up 17% to $1.5 billion. Analysts had predicted a 15% rise. The company’s all-important software license updates and product support revenues were also up 17% to $4 billion. Oracle co-president Safra Catz claimed “company-specific momentum.” Despite the turmoil over there, European sales were up 60% in the quarter, an important number because Oracle gets 30% of its revenue from Europe. However, hardware sales slouched 5% to $1 billion. Oracle still has faith though; it said it hired 350 salespeople in the quarter. In a statement co-president Mark Hurd said, “Our high-end server business – Exadata, Exalogic and Sparc M-Series – delivered solid double-digit revenue growth in Q1. In contrast, revenue declined in our low-end server business. By moving away from low-margin commodity hardware and focusing on high-end servers, we increased our hardware gross margins from 48% to 54%. Our strategy to grow the profitable parts of our hardware business is paying off.” That means selling widgetry that’s based solely on Oracle IP and that won’t happen until fiscal year 2013, according to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, when hardware should start showing top-line growth. Meantime, he said, he doesn’t care if “our commodity x86 business goes to zero.” Oracle’s not making any money selling other people’s IP. He did not address Sun’s server losses to competitors. In a step towards Ellison’s nirvana Oracle next week is supposed to announce a new high-performance Sparc microprocessor and a new high-end, Solaris 11-run, fault-tolerant server called a Sparc SuperCluster. Ellison said the new Sparc T4 chip is up to five times faster than the T3 part it replaces, and the new all-Oracle SuperCluster, engineered to use the T4 along with Exadata’s flash and disk storage system, is supposed to be cheaper and faster than anything IBM’s got. It’ll apparently do data analysis in-memory. Evidently Oracle is about to put out three other purely Oracle “engineered systems” at OpenWorld in a couple of weeks. The issue of unstructured data came up during the conference call, which gave Larry the chance to take out his switch blade and go for HP. He said Autonomy, the unstructured data company HP is buying, was shopped to Oracle and he was “shocked” by HP’s “absurdly high” bid of $10.25 billion for the British software company. He then explained that the Oracle Database hadn’t been simply an RDBMS for 20 years and had absorbed object database methodology when it came along, then text search and XML, and now it’s supposed to integrate unstructured data too and process it as well as Autonomy. For its next trick the database will interface with anybody’s Hadoop appliance and process the Big Data that Hadoop feeds it. After starting the widgetry six years ago Oracle is supposed to go GA with its Fusion apps by Christmas. Evidently Fusion already has 200 customers. Oracle is also going to start pushing CRM cloud apps (SaaS stuff like Salesforce) this quarter. Oracle shares were tickled 3% after-hours after falling 2.3% during the day. It closed at $28.35. Nothing was said during the conference call about the court-ordered negotiations Ellison had Monday and Tuesday with Google CEO Larry Page to resolve Oracle’s Java infringement suit. Oracle guided to non-GAAP revenues up 4%-8% to $9 billion-$9.34 billion this quarter on new software license revenue up 6%-16% and hardware flat to down 5%. Non-GAAP profits should be 56 cents-58 cents a share. The Street figured revenues at $9.36 billion.

Speaking at Oracle Open World

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 17:34:00 EDT

It's not often I am on the same roster as Sting and Tom Petty, but at Oracle Open World I am. Admittedly Sting and Tom Petty will be performing to tens of thousands of people on Treasure Island, whereas I will be speaking at the much less dramatic setting of a Moscone Center auditorium the previous day. My presentation is titled "Cloud Security Case Studies of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS". The talk comes under the "Focus on Identity Management " list talks, and on that list I see a whole bunch of talks which I hope I will have the opportunity to attend. The conference is always very busy with many customers present, so that may be difficult, but I will try.

Inoapps Acquires Teamsolve

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 07:52:00 EDT

Oracle solutions specialist, Inoapps is today announcing it has completed its acquisition of Teamsolve, a specialist in Oracle technology and managed services. Complementing existing Inoapps capabilities, Teamsolve has been acquired because of its outstanding Oracle technical capability and managed services. This underpins the application focus to Inoapps business with robust back end technology solutions and managed services operations. The acquisition will see Inoapps further strengthen its position as a leading Oracle partner in the UK. With over nine combined Oracle Specializations, Inoapps is one of the top performing Oracle Resellers and service providers in the UK. It also recently achieved the status of Oracle's 'Accelerate Partner of the Year' for the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region as well as being Applications Partner of the Year for the last 3-years consecutively. This acquisition for growth creates a company with strengths based on complementary skills, technologies and distribution channels.

HP Threatens to Sue Oracle Over Itanium

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 20:36:00 EDT

Hewlett-Packard is threatening to sue Oracle to get it to change its mind and keep supporting Intel’s Itanium chip. Oh, boy, is this gonna be fun. Seems first thing Wednesday morning HP had a “formal legal demand letter” delivered to Oracle telling Oracle it was legally obligated to continue to churn out software for Itanium-based servers that practically nobody but HP sells and even HP doesn’t sell that many of. Intel says the whole Itanium ecosystem is worth about $4 billion these days. The next thing HP apparently did was to call up the Wall Street Journal, Reuters and Bloomberg and tell them what was afoot. It wouldn’t share the letter with anybody or explain exactly why Oracle was legally bound to act against its own best interests now that it owns Sun and competes with HP, but it did tell them some version or another of the statement “We will take whatever legal actions are available to us to get Oracle to meet the legal commitments it has made to support HP platforms.” It may have muttered something about choice and competitive harm and told the All Things Digital blog that Oracle’s decision was an “unlawful attempt to force customers from HP Itanium platforms” onto its own Sun machines. It told everybody that Oracle and HP share 140,000 customers and claimed it’s acting in the customers’ interests and in defense of the big investments they’ve made in the widgetry. So to recap: In March Oracle up and announced out of the blue that it was dropping Itanium support claiming that it had talked to Intel executive and clearly saw that Itanium was approaching end of life. Intel, which has two more Itaniums penciled in, denied it but does go around saying its mainstream Xeon chip is now sturdy enough to support any workload and pretty much matches all Itanium’s features. Oracle’s not the only one to give up on Itanium. Microsoft and Red Hat have also thrown in the towel. For the last year or so, as everyone knows, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has publicly used HP, its board and its new CEO as punching bags so apparently the one-time best friends can be counted on to go a few more entertaining rounds.

Oracle Fusion Applications: Respect and Suspect

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 09:23:00 EDT

There is an old saying: Respect and Suspect. When someone declare, write or say something, do not decry or ignore him - respect him. It may turn out that the information he provides is valuable or useful. On the other hand, Suspect and check whether what was manifested is true, half true or false. This attitude is the corn stone of Scientific Research. I am not a Scientist, but during few decades in IT, I found Respect and Suspect as very useful approach as well as in my hobby playing Bridge (respect and suspect your opponents bids and play).

Oracle Leading Network Enablement for Wholesale App Community Operators

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 02:00:00 EST

As a member of the Wholesale Application Community (WAC), Oracle is contributing and collaborating with the largest global initiative of mobile communications service providers and vendors to establish a common network application programming interface (API) framework to network-enable their existing application stores. The WAC is an industry-wide consortium establishing a common framework to simplify mobile application development by enabling developers to write applications that can be deployed across multiple platforms and operators -- helping reach a potential global market of more than 3 billion users. Network-enabled application stores allow third-party developers to use valuable capabilities inherent in an operator's communications network -- such as in-application billing, premium messaging and mobile advertising campaigns -- to develop richer applications for consumers and enterprises.

Oracle Enables Agile, Service-Driven Planning of Next-Generation Networks

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 02:00:00 EST

Toenable network operators to effectively plan and optimize their next-generation networks (NGNs), Oracle today announced the availability of Oracle Communications Network Intelligence 3.4. Data traffic across NGNs is growing rapidly and is increasingly dynamic with the proliferation of mobile broadband services. This creates greater challenges for network operators working to ensure a problem-free service experience for existing customers and sufficient network capacity for new or upgrading customers. Oracle Communications Network Intelligence 3.4 enables the forecasting, analysis and planning of heterogeneous NGNs using pre-built modeling packs for key technologies including Long Term Evolution (LTE), Ethernet, Internet Protocol/Multi-Protocol Label Switching (IP/MPLS), Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) / Synchronous Optical Networking (SONET), Plesiochronous Digital Hierarchy (PDH), Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and Frame Relay (FR).

Oracle Unveils Netra SPARC T3 Servers

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 02:00:00 EST

Bringing the performance, scalability and power efficiency of the SPARC T3 to the communications market, Oracle today announced two new carrier-grade, NEBS Level 3-certified servers -- Oracle's Netra SPARC T3-1 rackmount server and Oracle's Netra SPARC T3-1BA ATCA blade server. The new Netra SPARC T3 servers further expand Oracle's complete portfolio for the communications industry, which includes carrier-grade servers, storage and application software to run operations support systems and service delivery platforms with easy migration capabilities and unmatched investment protection via the binary compatibility guarantee of the Oracle Solaris operating system.

Oracle Provides Software Suite for Wireless Service

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 17:15:00 EST

Oracle is supporting Cox Communications’ new wireless offering and is delivering an integrated, end-to-end suite of applications and infrastructure. The third-largest cable provider in the United States recently added wireless to its bundle of digital cable, high-speed Internet and telephone services. Oracle software manages entire wireless concept-to-cash processes – from service and offer creation to sales, customer care, order management, fulfillment and billing.

Has Cloud Computing Reached a New Inflection Point?

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 07:00:00 EST

The article talks about software vendors partnering with public clouds to create a new ecosystem that is beneficial to everyone -- consumers, vendors and cloud service providers. I think the debate on which one of the two models, on-premise or public cloud, would survive in the long run is practically over. We all know now that both would coexist, giving rise to a hybrid environment that would include best of both the worlds. I had actively been proposing this model for more than two years. There can't be anything more gratifying than getting an affirmation from the big players.

Oracle and IBM Tinkering with OpenJDK Rules

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 20:00:00 EST

Oracle, it seems, has been closeted with representatives of IBM and the IBM-inspired Eclipse Foundation since November tinkering with the OpenJDK bylaws. That was after Apple turned over all future Java updates for its Mac OS to Oracle and OpenJDK, and IBM abandoned the Apache Foundation’s rival Project Harmony (Java SE), recognized the OpenJDK as the primary open source Java runtime in solidarity with Oracle, and promised to collaborate on the Java Standard Edition (SE) reference implementation in return for a “strong say in how the project is managed and in which technical direction it goes.”

SQL Tables with All Datatypes

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 12:00:28 EST

This is a very common task that most application/database developers come across; testing various datatypes of a database. Honoring the principle DRY, here is a template with ddl for table creation (covering most data types) across various databases.

Oracle Fusion Applications

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 09:26:00 EST

The release of the much-anticipated Fusion Applications from Oracle will be made available on a general basis beginning in the first quarter of 2011. Fusion Applications is designed to be a next-gen combination of Oracle’s mainstream offerings, including PeopleSoft, the E-Business Suite as well as Siebel. This has been no small feat. Oracle Fusion Applications has been five years in the making, and is a tremendous effort of engineering. They design team had to take the best features of those applications and try to implement them onto Oracle’s Fusion Middleware infrastructure.

Oracle Introduces New Enterprise Document Automation Solution

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 14:25:00 EST

Oracle on Monday announced the availability of Oracle Documaker Enterprise Edition, the next generation of the company’s market solution for creating and managing enterprise communications. The release delivers adaptive enterprise content, more communications, when and how customers and other stakeholders want it. Oracle Documaker Enterprise Edition features a redesigned, Web-based iDocumaker module that improves communications throughout the customer lifecycle. Relying on rules-based configurability, a content library and embedded workflow, iDocumaker enables any user with an Internet connection to quickly and interactively create and assemble compliant communications, such as letters, policies and ID cards, from their desktops.

Oracle Sales Surge 47%

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 07:45:00 EST

Oracle’s fiscal Q2 revenues were up 47% to $8.6 billion, ahead of expectations of $8.3 billion. Its performance was nothing like poor Cisco, suggesting that maybe the portents aren’t as bad as the doom merchants say. The all-important new software license revenues were up 21% to $2 billion. Oracle co-president Safra Catz, who predicted only 6%-16% growth last quarter, credited “company-specific momentum” for the 21% uptick in new licenses. Software license updates and product support revenues were up 12% to $3.6 billion. Sun hardware and support revenues were worth $1.75 billion, roughly 20% of Oracle’s total, with a gross margin on hardware of 53%. Oracle co-president Mark Hurd said the pre-packaged hardware/software Exadata appliance pipeline is now worth nearly $2 billion.

Oracle Counts Clouds

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 09:00:00 EST

The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), which has 20,000 members, has run up an Oracle-sponsored survey that found significant cloud adoption by Oracle users. It polled 267 IT technology professionals and data managers: 29% reported they’ve already deployed an internal cloud and 37% indicated some piece of their workload processing or infrastructure is now available through private cloud services. The emphasis is on private platforms-as-a-service (with database and middleware capabilities). Adoption of private cloud services for IT workload processing or infrastructure is outpacing the use of public platform service providers, and the security of public clouds and online application services is a concern.

HP Responds to Oracle’s Threats

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 07:45:00 EST

After we reported that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was threatening to “go after” HP, which he characterized as a softer and more vulnerable target than IBM, with his newly reconstituted Sun boxes, HP had Burson Marsteller, its outside PR people, send us a statement saying: “HP is the No. 1 provider of enterprise servers in the world. We are focused on our customers, and those customers continue to be won over by our combination of technology, product performance, and pricing.

Guess That Means Oracle & HP Aren’t Friends Anymore

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 00:15:00 EST

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison got up on stage late Thursday in a rare, practically giddy mood to say that he had found a softer, more vulnerable target than IBM – which he’s been targeting since he got his hands on Sun – and that he means to take market share from Hewlett-Packard, a once dearly held database partner whose ex-CEO now works at Oracle and whose current CEO he held up to ridicule and allegations of past improprieties during his wildly victorious courtroom soap opera with SAP.

DOJ Investigation of SAP Reportedly Heightens

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 05:15:00 EST

The Justice Department has sent subpoenas to both Oracle and SAP requiring them to hand over all the evidence collected in the copyright infringement case that on Tuesday awarded an unprecedented $1.3 billion in damages to Oracle, according to a source close to the situation. The DOJ is reportedly going to use it to flesh out what could turn into criminal indictments against all who served on the SAP board when it decided – despite its own evidence that TomorrowNow was a thief – to go ahead and buy the third-party maintenance operation for $10 million. That includes recently installed HP CEO Léo Apotheker.

SAP to Ask Court to Lower Fine: Report

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 16:00:00 EST

SAP is going to ask the judge who presided over its trial for infringing Oracle’s copyrights to lower the unprecedented $1.3 billion in damages awarded to Oracle last week, according to Bloomberg quoting Euro am Sonntag, the German business publication. SAP was expected to file a post-trial motion. They seem to expect a decision by next week.

Oracle Issues Statement After SAP Verdict

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 10:29:00 EST

Oracle Issues Statement

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 09:00:00 EST

It took Oracle a while to recover from its giddiness at winning a record $1.3 billion judgment against SAP Tuesday to issue a statement that nobody in the press could wait for. One gathers that means it was surprised and unprepared as well as silly with delight. Nevertheless when it finally found its voice it had its president, Safra Catz, reiterate its position. She said, “For more than three years, SAP stole thousands of copies of Oracle software and then resold that software and related services to Oracle’s own customers. Right before the trial began, SAP admitted its guilt and liability; then the trial made it clear that SAP’s most senior executives were aware of the illegal activity from the very beginning. As a result, a United States Federal Court has ordered SAP to pay Oracle $1.3 billion. This is the largest amount ever awarded for software piracy.”

Oracle’s Lawyer Drags Apology Out of SAP

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 08:30:00 EST

Closing arguments in Oracle’s copyright infringement suit against SAP are set for next week. Oracle rested its case Monday without showing the jury its videotaped deposition of HP’s new CEO Léo Apotheker, who’s still MIA and likely to remain so until the jury figures out how much money SAP should pay Oracle for pinching its software. Oracle expects to get mileage out of the fact that Apotheker has been playing hide and seek and staying outside the reach of its process servers. It could show the video during rebuttal. According the Dow Jones blog All Things Digital, Oracle’s star litigator David Boies told the press last Friday outside court that “Maybe we’ll just let the jury know that [HP’s] hidden him. I think it may be better for the jury to know that here’s this guy who was at the center of all this [and we can’t find him].”

Léo Spotted in Japan

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 05:37:00 EST

Told ya so. Told ya so. Told ya HP CEO Léo Apotheker was in the Far East way beyond the reach of Oracle’s process servers. Reuters said late Tuesday that he gave an interview to the Nikkei business daily last Friday that didn’t appear in print until Saturday and then only in Japanese. The story said he was in Tokyo. Of course he could be long gone by now and Reuters said HP again refused to disclose his current location.

SAP Reportedly Agrees to Pay Oracle’s Lawyers $120 Million

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 12:15:00 EST

SAP reportedly agreed Monday to pay Oracle $120 million just to cover its “past and future reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs.” Those are the fees that Oracle has wracked up pursuing its case for theft against SAP and TomorrowNow, SAP’s IP-downloading cut-rate third-party maintenance subsidiary, the now shuttered unit that got SAP in the hot water it’s now stewing in in a California federal court. The joint stipulation is sealed now, carrying the notice “FILED IN ERROR. DOCUMENT LOCKED” in big bold letters on the court docket but IDG got a look at it first.

Larry Was Right, Leo's On the Run

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 23:59:00 EDT

Late Wednesday, three days into the SAP trial, Oracle came out and said, “Hewlett-Packard has refused to accept service of a subpoena requiring Mr. Apotheker to testify about his role in SAP’s illegal conduct. Mr. Apotheker started work for HP on Monday, but it now appears that the HP Board of Directors has decided to keep him away from HP’s headquarters and outside the court’s jurisdiction. We will continue to try to serve him.”