Oracle fails to speak

ORACLE'S ANNUAL OpenWorld conference is one of the technology world's biggest global events. Even with the expected slight decline in numbers this year, the scale is phenomenal: last week 37,000 people packed into San Francisco's Moscone Convention Centre to talk all things Oracle, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

That was down five or six thousand on last year, but most companies would be thrilled to get 6,000 showing up at a corporate event. Few can pack out a convention centre with the equivalent of a sports stadium audience.

But the audience didn’t exactly get a cliffhanger event. Though the conference unfolded with military precision as usual, there wasn’t a lot of beef in the burger. By OpenWorld standards, it was a fairly bland event, with few chunky announcements.

In large part, that was due to the European Commission. Thanks to its leisurely deliberations over competition implications, OpenWorld was deprived of what should have been its centrepiece, Oracle’s (planned) acquisition of hardware giant Sun Microsystems (see panel). Company executives – even the famously mouthy chief executive Larry Ellison – had to remain cautious about making any comments on the ongoing negotiations.

Loic le Guisquet, new executive vice-president of Oracle EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) batted away an Irish Times query on the situation and even Ellison limited his comments to a mild reiteration that Sun – which cut 3,000 jobs this week – was losing $100 million a week due to the delay.

Nonetheless, Ellison made sure Sun was at the heart of OpenWorld. Sun co-founder and former chief executive Scott McNealy kicked off the conference, giving one of the best talks during a special Sun keynote event. Ellison also saved one of the show’s major announcements – of a second iteration of its Exadata storage server, built by Sun – for his closing keynote.

Still, the fact that Ellison turned a third of his keynote time over to California “Governator” Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s paean to the state’s tech companies Wednesday indicated he didn’t have a huge amount to say or announce.

However, as always, what he did have to say was frequently pointed and amusing, such as his promise to pay $10 million to anyone who could prove an application didn’t run twice as fast on an Exadata 2 compared to an IBM server. “Anyone need $10 million? That’s all you need to do to get it,” he quipped.

Ellison also gave the first glimpse of what will be in Oracle’s long-promised, much-delayed Fusion Applications, which is to be a collection of some of its best software programs.

“We are code complete,” he said, noting that the applications were being tested live with customers and would be available in 2010.

However, when the keynote ran half-an-hour late, the audience voted with its feet and many left as an assistant went into a product demonstration. Usually, the Ellison keynote is the conference highlight and no one budges.

Other Oracle keynotes were surprisingly uneventful as well. Co-presidents Charles Phillips and Safra Catz gave an overview of the past year, but the interesting nitty-gritty details usually offered by Phillips were lacking.

The most interesting takeaway nugget from the talk was his reminder of Oracle’s sheer scale, after its extraordinary shopping spree for companies in recent years. The company now has a mid-boggling 3,000 software products, he said, and the list is still growing.

Regular guests like Dell boss Michael Dell and HP vice-president Ann Livermore also gave keynotes but, again, these were more company promotionals than inspiring pep talks.

Ironically for an Oracle event, in addition to the Sun evening, the other highlight was a talk by sometime Oracle enemy, sometime friend Marc Benioff, head of rival Salesforce.com.

Invited by Oracle but kept safely outside the main Moscone centre in a separate theatre, Benioff drew a packed audience curious to hear what he would say after many years of Oracle jibes. But he was full of praise for Oracle and Ellison and noted he was there because the companies realised customers that run Oracle also often run “cloud computing” applications like those from Salesforce.

Still, one doesn’t expect to go to an Oracle event and be inspired by Salesforce.com. Perhaps just another sign of the topsy-turvy times we are in. Still, Ellison could do worse than fit Benioff into his keynote line-up next year.

EC concerns

THE EUROPEAN Commission’s scrutiny of Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Micrososystems – already approved by the US – hangs on European concerns about what might happen to the open source MySQL database application Sun owns.

The commission fears there may be serious competition issues if Oracle acquires the world’s largest non-commercial, open source database.

Oracle has its origins as a database company, and has made considerable investment in its own commercial database. It produces extensive software database products and now, with the release last week of its Exadata storage server produced by Sun, a database hardware product.

Sensing an opportunity, open source advocates, including open source strategist Florian Mueller and famed GNU-Linux developer and free software advocate Richard Stallman, have begun a campaign to have Oracle spin off MySQL and return it to the open source community, opening the way for the Oracle/Sun merger to go through.

On Monday, Michael “Monty” Widenius, the creator of MySQL and founder of the Swedish company that sold it to Sun, issued a press release asking that Oracle “be constructive and sell MySQL to a suitable third party”. He said MySQL needed a different home than Oracle “where there will be no conflicts of interest concerning how, or if, MySQL will be developed further”.

On Tuesday, Stallman as well as two non-profits, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) and the Open Rights Group (ORG), sent a letter to EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes stating that “Oracle should not be permitted to acquire its competitor, MySQL”. They argue that Oracle’s ownership of MySQL would cause “profound harm” to those who use MySQL to power software applications because Oracle’s inclination will be to limit MySQL’s development.

The group takes issue with Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison’s insistence during Oracle OpenWorld that he will not sell MySQL and that it does not compete directly with Oracle’s database.

Ellison pointed to Oracle’s contribution to the development of open source operating system Linux as an example of how commercial and non-commercial objectives could co-exist.

Ellison reiterated his claim that Sun is losing $100 million a week due to Europe’s indecision about the merger.

The letter is available at: http://keionline.org/ec-mysql