Bradley D. Brown

Each year at Oracle Open World, Oracle makes a big announcement.  2 years ago, the big annoucement was how Oracle squashed Red Hat by providing OS support for half of Red Hat’s going rate for support.  Oracle could easily do it for half price - Red Hat was doing all of Oracle’s R&D on the OS.  What a brilliant move against open sourcing your software.  Last year there were many big annoucements.  I predicted Oracle’s big annoucement would be that they were going to offer up Oracle through Amazon’s Cloud offering.  That was one of MANY annoucements - in fact, there were so many annoucements that the cloud offering went almost unnoticed.  Much to my surprise, I haven’t heard any great success stories about this offering in the last year either.  The big annoucement last year was the HP / Oracle hardware offering - a massive parallel processing computer for data warehousing.  Interesting, but didn’t wow me personally.  I haven’t personally “played” with one - have you? 

So what will the annoucements be this year?  It used to be one annoucement - now clearly it’s now going to be many BIG annoucements.  With all of the acquisitions, it’s no wonder.  What’s the big recent annoucement - Oracle purchasing Sun of course.  So what does that mean for open source?  Who was the largest open source vendor or all?  Sun?  Sun had purchased the best open source DBs (in my opinion) - MySQL.  Sun started much of the open source revolution with none other than Java.  Java’s an open source programming language.  What’s this annoucement mean for Java and all of the products based on Java?  Oracle’s purchased MANY such products.  From BEAs product lines to Java Containers to so much more.  In fact they have thrown out more software than most companies will ever own or write in a lifetime.  Oracle was partnering into the hardware world last year…and now they are in the hardware business.  They’ve made it clear that they are gunning for IBM.  So will they purchase HP next?  Flip (Platinum Software) predicted many years ago (almost 15 now) that it would all come down to a couple of vendors - he usually mentioned IBM and Oracle (and Platinum of course).  CA’s still around aren’t they! Who’s next?  When will the SEC step in?

I wish I could dream up a prediction for this coming OOW.  I’m confident that Oracle will announce something big at OOW.  It’s only about 4 weeks away!  What will the annoucement be?  Who will be crushed this year?  Who will be celebrating?  Oracle’s already annouced that their Exadata box is available on their Sun hardware: 

Announcing the World’s First OLTP Database Machine
with Sun FlashFire Technology

You are invited to attend this exclusive live Webcast in which Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will unveil an innovative new product, the world’s first OLTP database machine with Sun FlashFire technology. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn firsthand how the partnership between Oracle and Sun can benefit your business now and in the future.

Who: Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle, and John Fowler, EVP, Sun
When: Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 1 p.m. PT/4 p.m. ET

Register now to watch the live Webcast.

After the event, we invite you to watch the Webcast on demand at your convenience.

Larry is 65 this year - maybe he’s going to annouce that’s going to take some time away from the business?  Will that be the big annoucement?

Bradley D. Brown Sun, oracle