Oracle OpenWorld 2011: Data Analytics at the "Speed of Thought"
Oracle's
OpenWorld kicked off this week in San Francisco. CEO Larry Ellison gave the keynote last night where he introduced and highlighted the Exalytics Intelligence Machine, a new in-memory appliance that utilizes data compression and also storing data in DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) to substantially increase business data analytics performance. It analyzes data "several times faster" according to Larry, enabling the scanning of 200 GB/sec of data, enabling "questions to be answered before they are even asked."
This and other announcements highlight what should be a great conference and show. It will be interesting to see if Oracle provides increased clarity around some of the following questions this week, such as:
What are Oracle's long-term Java plans? Will it continue to remain open post-acquisition of Sun, or can we expect to see a flurry of Java-licensing lawsuits such as the current one with Google they may cause some to doubt its interpretation of "openness"?
Will Oracle continue to move into larger-scale systems, including more hardware offerings, to compete with IBM and SAP? Oracle currently has sold over one thousand of its Exadata machines to date, so it is currently heading in this direction.
Will Oracle continue to push the "Public Cloud", or will it steer customers and the industry more towards its "Private Cloud" solutions that are "more secure" but also require individual software purchases rather than time-shared subscriptions?
Now that Fusion Applications have been made available on Cloud, on-premise, and mobile platforms, where is is the collection of offerings and integration with other Oracle platforms headed from here?
Will it continue to add more features and capabilities to its On Demand applications, such as CRM On Demand? Its acquisition of Market2Lead last year demonstrates its advance into On Demand marketing automation platforms.
StrikeIron, as an Oracle Gold Partner, is expressly interested in the future direction of Oracle and where the company is headed. Currently, our
collaboration with another Oracle partner, ActivePrime, enables us to deliver an integrated customer data quality solution to the Oracle CRM On Demand platform. Also, offerings such as our
customer data quality solutions and
mobile messaging solutions are available for integration into Oracle's broad stack of applications, products, and platforms. All of the great database innovation in the world won't help if it's not running on top of high quality, complete, and accurate data.
