The economy may be in turmoil, and the national mood is screaming for fiscal conservatism, but for a few days this week there were no “tea parties” in downtown San Francisco.
There was Larry Ellison invoking amazon a few times this week, but with nary a mention of how Oracle’s own Exalogic would be available on-demand with compute and storage on an hourly basis, not massive multi-year capex.
Many of my colleagues praised Fusion applications for their look and feel and embedded analytics, but I did not hear many ask – will they be priced at $ 50 a user a month, not the amortized cost of large license plus 22% annual maintenance plus large Accenture project plus large HP infrastructure cost plus large annual Infosys application support?
I did not hear anyone go “Oracle decided to write another fork of Linux? Did they check with customers before they spent that R&D” I did not hear much on what Oracle’s lawsuit of Google means to the likely cost of Java development going forward. Oh, there were signs of protest - many keynotes at OOW had people headed for fresh air, but few threatened to walk out with their checkbooks.
Having researched for my book the speed and economics at which the Chinese are innovating in cleantech, transportation and so many other sectors, I cringe when I see so many Western dollars go into back office and infrastructure IT. Much of the $ 3 trillion in annual IT and telecom spend, in fact.
While Oracle and its ecosystem make up only a fraction of that I did ask myself a few times this week – how would the Chinese spend that money? Likely not on a pretty looking HCM or a Linux fork.
