Wall Street Cools on Oracle
News out in the virtual world is that some analysts have trimmed their sails regarding Oracle’s financial picture. The company missed its revenue forecast last time and today the financial guys are concerned about competition in the database business and lack of strong market support for the company’s hardware. Competition from companies like SAP with [...]
Open World Day 1 #OOW11
Oracle is a big company and that point gets driven home when you start to go in-depth on their products. At a show like OpenWorld which is dedicated more or less to touching on every aspect of the business, you can quickly get out of your depth. Since the opening keynote on Sunday the talk [...]
IBM STG Trip Report Part 1: Hardware-Software Synergy Yielding Dividends
Every year in the fourth quarter, IBM assembles its Systems & Technology Group (STG – the hardware guys) executives for discussions with the analyst community to review results and discuss the year ahead. STG’s Senior VP Rod Adkins teed up this year’s meeting with a reminder that STG and Software Group (SWG) both now report [...]
IBM’s IOD Showcases DB2, Informix, InfoSphere. Now, About Marketing….
It was hard to decide where to look first in Las Vegas this year at IBM’s flagship information management event. Coming as it did on the heels of a massive, sprawling Oracle Open World, it was also overwhelming, but distinguished itself immediately by its focus. Whereas Oracle has smashed together hardware systems, apps, middleware, java [...]
Oracle’s Exadata Refresh Ups Ante on Technology and Selling Strategy
The Exadata marketing story is unrelenting, and Oracle backed it with plenty of happy customers for analysts to query at Open World this year. The stories were compelling; I’ll mention a few below. In the analyst pitch, we were shown a couple of dozen logos – good for a still relatively new high-end, long sales [...]
EMC Jumps Into ADBMS Appliance Game
The Data Computing Appliance, first deliverable from EMC’s acquisition of Greenplum, was announced last month, only 75 days after the acquisition closed, and it doesn’t lack for ambition. Pat Gelsinger, EMC CEO, pointed to the high level opportunity: unlocking the “hidden value” of enormous and growing data assets every company is increasingly holding, and often [...]
Database Benchmarks – The Gift That Keeps on Giving
Yes, I know – not everyone believes database benchmarks are useful. My position is that there is value in benchmarks’ role in helping engineers wring out bottlenecks, bugs and performance impediments in their products. In a conversation I recently had with Berni Schiefer, Distinguished Engineer and manager of the DB2 UDB Performance and Advanced Technology [...]
EMC Buys Greenplum – Big Data Realignment Continues
EMC’s acquisition of Greenplum, announced today as a cash transaction, reaffirms the obvious: the Big Data tsunami upends conventional wisdom. It has already reshaped the market, spawning the most ferment in the RDBMS (and non-R DBMS via the noSQL players) space in years. When I first posted on Greenplum over a year ago, I said [...]
Oracle Exadata: Early Signs Promising
Exadata is looking good. In the past few months, I’ve had the chance to talk to several early adopters of Oracle Exadata V2, some in connection with a sponsored white paper Oracle has just published. It’s still early, but I see this product as a milestone, regardless of its commercial success. That is still to [...]
