Larry Ellison's Key Note at the Oracle Open World 2012
I watched Larry Ellison's key note and it was a typical brash and brilliant oration from the man. There were four important announcements which would definitely catch everyone's eye. Importantly, it is amazing to see big technology innovations coming to the front from such a large company like Oracle. The announcements by Larry are listed below:
- Oracle Database 12c
- Launch of Exadata X3
- Launch of Oracle's In-Memory Database
- IaaS in addition to SaaS and PaaS on Oracle Cloud
- Oracle Database 12c - this is the biggest innovation from Oracle where customers can now manage many database instances as one. 12c offers a plug and play model where customers can add/remove databases corresponding to many applications and centrally manage them. In addition, 12c - named with a 'c' to indicate that the database is cloud-ready - is built to host multiple customers as a cloud offering. Multi-tenancy is now built into the database rather than being managed at the application layer. Each customer will get to use their own private database that can be plugged in and plugged out at will and each private database for each customer will come with its own individual database files this ensuring complete security and access controls across customer databases.
- Exadata X3 is launched and Oracle promises that this is the fastest ever server one can see today. The Database 12c, FMW and Fusion Apps are all offered along with the X3 box where Oracle has ensured that hardware and software and engineered together to deliver performance that is 100 times faster than the Exadata Oracle launched in the last couple of years.
- In addition, Oracle also offers the Oracle Database 12c in-memory and this will actually dwarf SAP's HANA by a matter of 52 times. While HANA can handle up to 0.5 TB of data in-memory, Oracle In-Memory database can manage up to 26TB of data.
- Apart from offering applications on Oracle Cloud, Oracle is also now offering Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). Oracle's customers can now reduce their CAPEX by opting to subscribe to Oracle's plug and play IaaS and pay for only what they use. Oracle also offers to manage a customer's private cloud if the customer has inhibitions to move into the Oracle Public Cloud offerings. Oracle will own the boxes and licenses and customers will only pay a subscription (obviously higher than what they will pay for IaaS and SaaS) and use it as their private cloud. Oracle will also manage it for the customers.
- An interesting part announcement was also about Oracle also working on a chip with Fujitsu where a lot of code is being "moved into silicon" as Larry put it. This could mean that a lot of code will actually be built into the chip making applications run many hundred times faster as there is no I/O or even Flash Memory reads involved now.
Oracle plans to manage the instances and also provide the upgrade patches to customers. Since in Fusion Applications, upgrades do not need a RICE retro-fitting (at least as promised by Oracle), application upgrades are going to be seamless to customers unless they want to uptake some new functionality in the latest release.
There is quite a bit happening at Oracle. There was a time when Oracle used to innovate to be the leader. Today, Oracle's innovations seem to be to stay in the game - be it the in-memory database to compete with SAP's HANA or the cloud offerings (SaaS and IaaS). These are tough times for Oracle and us SIs.
Comments
It is very helpful to get this perspective which I would not get from reading different sources
Posted by: SHANKAR VAIDYANATHAN | October 3, 2012 8:52 AM
Fascinating and thanks much for sharing. "Cloud" to me is akin to the Shared Service Support concept extended to hardware and infra management.Remains to be seen how aspects of data security, DR/BCP etc get managed under IaaS since irrespective of whether it is Public or Private it ultimately boils down to a third party managing an organization's data residing in a box over which they do not have any physical control. The last bit on code embedded in silicon is truly interesting - wonder whether they are doing it only for the Middleware layer or to the DB layer also ?
Posted by: Sudip Vasudevan | October 3, 2012 12:26 PM