Welcome!

Cloud Expo Authors: Maureen O'Gara, Patrick Burke, Jason Bloomberg, Liz McMillan, Sebastian Kruk

Related Topics: Cloud Expo

Cloud Expo: Article

No Time for a Petulant Oracle

Is OpenStack's Momentum a Threat?

Oracle was notable for its absence at the recent Cloud Expo in Santa Clara. Previously a headliner, the company may be threatened by the emergence and aggressive marketing of all of the OpenStack folks, if I'm reading between the lines properly.

Oracle is widely reviled - and I don't think that's too strong a word - by open-source vendors and others in the cloud industry for its alleged cloudwashing activities. Who hasn't chortled at the famous clip of Larry Ellison mocking cloud a few years ago, only to watch him subsequently pour his company's old wine into new cloudish bottles?

All kidding aside, this is no time for a petulant Oracle. All of the IT megavendors have made major moves to the cloud. Many of them have done it through OpenStack, including IBM, HP, Cisco, and Dell. Microsoft has gone directly into the hardware business with its Surface tablet as part of its strategy. SAP recently updated its Hana cloud-computing initiative.

Oracle's cloud strategy, for better or worse, does and will have a big influence on the cloud-computing industry. This is the nature of a company that claims a locked-in presence at 98% of Fortune 500 companies. Whether its efforts are cynical, uncloudish, and anathemic to true innovation is a matter that should be available for as much public view as possible.

We are in the early stages of one of the great change cycles in the history of computing, and for one, I'd like to see Oracle competing openly (so to speak) as often as possible. It's a pity I wasn't able to do so while roaming the halls of the Santa Clara Convention Center last week.

Follow me on Twitter

More Stories By Roger Strukhoff

Roger Strukhoff is Executive Director of the Tau Institute (@TauDir), focused on global ICT research, including the growth of cloud computing. Offices are located in Illinois and Makati City, Philippines. He also writes for Cloud Computing Journal, Computerworld Philippines, and CloudEcosystem.com. He holds a BA from Knox College, Technical Certificate from UC-Berkeley, and MBA from Cal State (Hayward).

Cloud Expo Breaking News
“Open source has always provided a number of benefits, including easing adoption costs, propagating a better understanding of the technology, and allowing for faster evolution and commercialization of products and services based on it,” noted Terry Woloszyn, Founder & CEO, Leeward Security Ltd., in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “This is clearly evident with the OpenStack and CloudStack,” Woloszyn continued, “and others that have been quickly commercialized as...
SYS-CON Events announced today that OpenStack will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. OpenStack software controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed by a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface. OpenStack powers some of the most widely-used SaaS app...
SYS-CON Events announced today that BUMI (Backup My Info!), the premium provider of managed online backup and recovery solutions for small to mid-sized businesses, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. Manhattan-based BUMI (Backup My Info!) is a premium managed service provider specializing in online data backup and recovery. Founded in 2002, the company's data backup and recovery serv...
SYS-CON Events announced today that nfina Technologies, a provider of highly reliable cloud server products, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. nfina Technologies develops, manufactures, and markets highly reliable cloud server products, designed to solve the most demanding data center requirements in mission-critical cloud applications. Nfina’s staff has decades of experience in co...
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Dave Eichorn, Global Data Center Practice Head at Zensar, will share a case study describing how a utility services company handled the migration of its Microsoft platform to the cloud. Challenged with the time-consuming task of opening operations out of temporary offices, this company struggled with the need to simultaneously access data that was accumulated from a vast amount of data-intensive jobs. Zensar migrated the company’s application ...
“Social, mobile, analytics and cloud can’t be looked at as distinct technology trends; they are facets of the same movement and an everyday reality for consumers and businesses alike,” said Craig Sowell, IBM VP of SmartCloud Marketing, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “This means that businesses need to start looking at trends as one: cloud is the delivery, analytics is the unique insight, social is a shareable service, and mobile is the ubiquitous access.” ...
Organizations across the world are increasingly starting to see the benefits of moving more and more services to the cloud. The focus on the cost-saving potential of cloud is rapidly shifting to completely transforming the business with cloud. As organizations are investing enormous sums on technology they are starting to realize that in order to maximize the return on investment and accelerate the business transformation process the first area of focus should be people. By ensuring the organiza...
SYS-CON Events announced today that Wowrack will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. Wowrack’s core expertise lies in high-availability Private and Public Cloud IaaS Hosting Solutions. Wowrack provides a true Hybrid service – where business release all IT management and hardware provisioning – taking the data center and server system administrative headaches off our customer’s shoulders. ...
As enterprises deploy private IaaS clouds into production they are reevaluating their future application delivery models. SUSE and WSO2 believe that private PaaS will leverage the automation and scalability of Private IaaS solutions, such as OpenStack-based SUSE Cloud, to deliver the secure, standardized development environments that will make migrating to an agile, serviceoriented delivery model possible. In their session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Chris Haddad, VP of Technology Ev...
"Since Cloud Expo is running the week of June 10, we thought it'd be a great idea to schedule our Meetup this week. That way, if you have colleagues, friends, or family in town that week for the Expo, you can invite them to join you!" With those words, the OpenStack New York Meetup Group's organizer's launched a landing page this week where anyone interested can register for the June 12 evening event.