Oracle could start looking like Apple
I recently attended the Oracle Technology Fair in Atlanta on March 11th. My goal was to see what Oracle has to offer in the Enterprise 2.0 space. I was pleasantly surprised by the Social media CMS offered among Oracle’s Enterprise 2.0 product offerings. There is also a product called BeeHive that wraps unified messaging tools around the Oracle stack.
As the day progressed, and I attended different breakout sessions on Business Intelligence and the Sun merger, I began to realize how integrated Oracle is going to become in the next 12 to 18 months.
Imagine getting a big cardboard box on the loading dock. You unpack the box to reveal a server. You plug in the Ethernet cable. You plug in the power cable. You log into the box and use Oracle Enterprise Manager, which is a “single pane of glass” that lets you manage “application to disk”, which is marketing speak for – “you get to manage everything from one central spot”.
Everything is preconfigured! The DASD is installed in the box, Oracle 11G V2 is pre-installed, and properly installed on the disk. If you so choose, tape backup is installed and pre-configured and mounted to look like a disk drive. Solaris is pre-installed. Any other middleware is pre-installed. All of it is configured for maximum utility and throughput. Imagine, Flash and SSD drives where the Oracle indexes are stored for hyperfast access to the Oracle database tables.
It’s been a few years since I’ve managed the installation of equipment in a datacenter, but not so long ago to realize what a work effort savings this is. For a typical installation, we had to do capacity planning for the box, order the right size box, order the right amount of DASD, and order the various applications from a multitude of vendors. OK, you’re right, no change there. However, next, you must properly stripe the DASD for maximum performance. You must attach the failover side of the RAID cluster to hot tape backups. You must then properly lay the database and other middleware apps onto the DASD for maximum performance. We allocated three to four man-weeks of expensive technical resource to perform this service. Not to mention the teething pains of getting the software and hardware working together in a high performance environment.
If Oracle can become as efficient internally between the hardware and software groups as Apple, it’s possible that they will be able to provide a brilliant user experience. Currently, IBM is the only other possible vendor who could do something similar, and they might, but clearly Oracle is in a position to take the lead.