Larry Ellison dedicated his keynote at Oracle OpenWorld to discuss the new Exadata database machine jointly developed with HP. Earned Oracle two mentions on the New Florence innovation blog - one for the new machine, one for the breathtaking new trimaran which he has been working on for his quest for America's Cup
About the speech, though - what was fascinating was there was no mention of Fusion - or indeed any of the Beehive or "social" CRM apps Oracle showcased earlier in week. No shots at Oracle's major competitors - SAP, Microsoft or soon to be Cisco in the collaboration space. Instead he picked on Teradata and Netezza? And he took friendly jibes on how many iPods would be needed to compete against its massive storage and memory specs.
While the new machine will make clients with massive databases (and with data exploding there are certainly a few of those) drool, it will be a curiosity to the majority of his customer base. In an uncomfortable moment, Mark Hurd of HP corrected him about promising too much price/performance (I read it as let the fools at Intel keep doing that, not us). Finally, he skipped his traditional Q&A, where he usually gets a broad range of questions from his faithful.
My bottom line: Missed opportunity to emphasize other messages/new products from the week. A fringe offering got too much emphasis.
As China Martens, a software analyst at The 451 Group told the New York Times: “It’s weird for a software company to say hardware is the answer to the problem and not go into the software side at all”
