Tag Archives: Sun

Oracle 11g Fusion Middleware LiveBlogging and News Analysis

by Miko Posted on July 1, 2009

Stand by for Oracle Fusion 11g Middleware Launch Liveblogging and analysis from SOA Center.

Java is the new SQL
We’re on a code level orange this morning as buzz on the networks is up. Despite Oracle’s news embargo, we’re already picking up chatter that one of the big ticket items from the Oracle Fusion Middleware launch is Tera-scale Java Object cacheing.

This is a great technology trend and great thinking.

While a few startup companies have attacked the so-called “Complex Event Processing” space (CEP), they have done so using esoteric APIs such as SQL query-like APIs for example StreamBase. This is an early-adopter (read:sucker) approach because who wants to build completely new applications?

There’s a clear answer to that rhetorical question: very few do. To see Coral8 be swallowed up by Aleri and other CEP vendors struggling out there, it’s clear that only the edgy applications such as fraud and intrusion detection, networked battlefield, casino gaming and a few other apps need the combination of real time and massive event window correlation provided by CEP. Whenever there’s a “paradigm shift”, look for a Moore’s Law style 10x improvement underlying it.

New business paradigms grow across stable interfaces (platforms) with an order of magnitude impedance mismatch. Oracle and the relational database ecosystem grew originally on top of SQL and the spinning disk drive platter and has maintained its advantage because of this mismatch. Adobe grew on top of PostScript and originally at the boundary between the printer and personal computer. BEA grew on top of the Java API through their timely acquisition of WebLogic, through the boundary between the “computer” and the “network”.

So what’s the 10x (or more) improvement in the underlying platform? It’s the expansion of RAM which is experiencing a Moore’s-law like doubling interval. The difference between spinning disk (millisecond scale) and RAM (nanosecond scale) is six or seven orders of magnitude.

So what are the implications for this huge shift into RAM? Well, there’s already some wonderful cacheing technologies like Tangosol (Oracle already bought them) that deal with pure SQL. But the age of the relational SQL API is coming to a close. Now like any good legacy, SQL will be immortal just like COBOL. But the emerging dominant API will be much more about the network and developer than about the underlying technology. What API better than Java? We see another company, Terracotta systems taking single VM Java semantics and clustering them using aspect technology from a crashed UFO. We see RNA Networks putting JMS onto a RAM cacheing box and kicking TIBCO out of a hedge fund company.

So SQL is toast.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/14/large_databases/print.html

The future of low latency has come, and it looks like Java.

So what does this say about Oracle’s strategy for forming SNORKEL, the Sun acquisition? Well, at the risk of reductio ad absurdum, having bought BEA and Sun, Larry Ellison sees Java as the new SQL.

Stay tuned for more news analysis and liveblogging.

my 2 cents,
Miko

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Sun Oracle Snorkel CEO Email makes me sick

by Miko Posted on April 21, 2009

Jeremy Geelan posted Jonathan Schwartz’s email to all Sun employees announcing the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle.

Frankly this email makes me very angry.

Please consider that analysts are responding to Oracle’s profitability plan:

Oracle expects the Sun deal to contribute $1.5 billion toward its earnings next year and $2 billion in the second year of the acquisition, making it “more profitable in per-share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,” Oracle President Safra Catz

This level of profitability is achievable with layoffs of up to 10,000 people.

Now lets read the words Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz wrote in his email

Having spent a considerable amount of time talking to Oracle, let me assure you they are single minded in their focus on the one asset that doesn’t appear in our financial statements: our people.

This is the part that makes me angry. I have a lot of friends at Sun and I don’t welcome the prospect of 10,000 people out there in the worst job market in recent memory. People with families. Hardworking people.

Here’s the problem with that statement: the people DO APPEAR ON THE FINANCIAL STATEMENTS. They appear as COST. How a company CEO can not know this suggests either large scale incompetence or a cavalier attitude about the power of words.

I absolutely agree with one thing: Oracle WILL be single minded in their focus on the people. Just analyze their statements about their profit expectations.

My 2 cents,
Miko

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Sun Oracle –”Snorkel” stretches limits of credulity

by Miko Posted on April 20, 2009

Snorkel will be a bloody mess! Oracle has no systems experience.

snorkel

What are the possible drivers for a SNORKEL (Sun Oracle)?

* Oracle Hardware? Oracle is claiming that highly specialized and tuned hardware can turn in up to 100x performance. So why not mash up Sun systems and Oracle to extend the Oracle appliance concept, already announced in partnership with HP.

>>my comment is this is not enough. With Oracle’s lack of experience in systems, this will be exceedingly hard for them to execute. They will try, but it will be bloody and difficult.

* MySQL: Oracle has long been rumored to be targeting RedHat for acquisition. So they are certainly exploring open source. In the database area, they are king, so the king of open source databases is not an unusual desire.

>>the problem with this is that Sun has already lost control of MySQL. With the MySQL team out of the company and the code base forking, there’s very little leverage other than professional services. Oracle provides almost *no* leverage in professional services compared to IBM.

* Cost synergy: Safra Catz, the CFO of Oracle has said she will make the Sun Hardware business “profitable”. This would mean burning the research team to the ground, as well as making all kinds of other dramatic cost cuts.

>>this will make sense. The party ended a long time ago at Sun, and although extremely grim in human terms, calling the police and having them break up what’s left and send people home is likely to generate a small amount of energy. It just requires new leadership to admit failure.

* The secret agenda:

>> Oracle has long held that there are “too many software companies”. However, they have long been envied by the likes of IBM and others for their higher margin product centric approach. They have yet to be seduced by the low margin services business. Margins in the services business have been impacted by offshoring and Oracle has shied away from this approach as it would make them a “weaker IBM”.

>> By promising to make Sun hardware “profitable”, Oracle seems to be suggesting that growth in software alone is not sufficient and that consolidation should be extended. Instead of taking a fundamental open source approach which is primarily driven by services revenue anyway, Oracle is moving to a systems approach. This is not a terribly optimistic acquisition in my opinion. On the one hand, it shows Oracle as acquisitive and opportunistic–but we knew that. But I bet there are many forces inside of Oracle who are dead set against this deal. Oracle doesnt have the skills to pull this off, and if there is a rationale for the deal, it’s being driven out of the CFO side of the shop, not from the software product side.

>> Shocking to think that internal to Oracle the finance side could run roughshod over the software strategy. This could point to weak financial projections.

>>This means that the game continues to be owned by consolidators and life is bitterly hard for the innovators.

My 2 cents,
Miko

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Sun IBM Collapse Heralds the Return of McNealy. Jonathan Schwartz is Toast.

by Miko Posted on April 5, 2009

The Wall st Journal reports two board factions at odds in Sun Microsystems, one in favor of the IBM deal led by Jonathan Schwartz, the other opposing, led by Scooter McNealy.

Pundits are already spinning this FAIL WHALE as a repeat of the Microsoft Yahoo! debacle starring another egotistical company founder, Jerry Yang.

Butting heads with Scott McNealy at Sun Microsystems is ill advised. Even if you are the CEO. With Schwartz touting an exit with IBM as being the company’s best option–after riding the share price down from 20 to a low of about 3… before rumors of the IBM takeover sent the stock soaring.

At a stock price of 3, Sun Microsystems was essentially being valued at about the same as their cash stockpile of 2.64 Billion, essentially declaring the company to be of no value.

Sun’s one billion dollar acquisition of MySQL is in shambles, with the source code forking and Sun having lost control of the key Intellectual Property as well as key technical founders.

This all makes Steve Gillmor’s Open Source Ponytail Video even more prescient.

Mark my words, Schwartz is toast, IBM deal or no deal. If the IBM deal fails completely (most likely outcome), look for Scott McNealy to pull a Michael Dell (or a Jerry Yang, depending on how you look at it) and to appoint himself CEO again. The board of Sun wouldn’t allow such a thing if there were even one viable suitor left. But there isn’t.

My 2 cents,
Miko

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