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#oow11 Oracle OpenWorld Day 4 Oracle Announcements
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Visits (10206)
![]() The last keynote session of the [Oracle OpenWorld 2011] conference was Oracle making a few major announcements. Steve Miranda, Senior VP for Oracle Applications, explained the new "Fusion 11g Apps" which are now generally available. Basically, they took all the scattered applications they have from acquisitions of PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and so on, and re-wrote them to industry-standard Java so that they would all run either on-premise or in the Cloud. The Enterprise Apps come in seven categories: Financials like General Ledger and Payroll; Human Capital Management (HCM) formerly known as Human Resources; Supply Chain Management (SCM); Customer Relationship Management (CRM); Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC); Procurement; and Project/Portfolio Management (PPM). Oracle also has "Industry Apps" for specific verticals. All of these apps have "embedded BI" (business intelligence), such as dashboards, multi-dimensional calculations, decision support, and real-time optimization. This is intended to help the end-user answer four questions:
Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO, said that it took six years to rewrite all the Fusion Apps. They used an "agile" development model with over 200 early adopters to ensure that these applications were successful. They were under a "controlled release program" but now that is over, and the applications are generally available. Larry indicates that these applications were developed under the concepts of Service Oriented Architecture [SOA], which neither Salesforce.com nor SAP R3 have. (This made me chuckle. SOA was initially developed by IBM and Microsoft, but is now industry standard. There is no reason not to develop software that isn't SOA.) Following the IBM model, Oracle has built-in the security at the OS, Database and Middleware layer, rather than in each application. As IBM has understood for several decades, a secure infrastructure is the way to go so that all applications are secure. With all these Fusion Apps now re-written so that they work on industry-standard Java (J2EE, actually), allowing them to run either on-premise or out on the Cloud, Larry Ellison said "I guess we need a Cloud!" This started his announcement of the "Oracle Public Cloud" [OPC]. OPC has both PaaS and SaaS. The PaaS would offer VM instances with support for database and Java services. The SaaS would be all the Fusion Apps rented on the "as-a-service" model. Rather than force everyone to Oracle 11g, you can run any Oracle database on OPC, and you can run any Java or J2EE application on the OPC. Your data is portable. Larry is pro-choice, and wants people to be able to move from any cloud to any cloud. Since it's based on industry-standard Java, applications can move seamlessly between OPC, Amazon EC2 and IBM SmartCloud. IBM has been a major force behind [Open Cloud Standards], so it is always good that other major vendors follow suit. He quoted [someone as saying "Beware of False Clouds"] This was Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff's attack against all "Private Cloud" IT vendors. Larry twisted this to say he agrees, "True Clouds" are based on open industry standards, and "False Clouds" are vendor-lockin. OPC is based on Java, J2EE, XML, BPEL and Ruby on Rails, whereas Salesforce.com is based on proprietary Heroku and APEX. He called Salesforce.com the "Roach Motel of Cloud Computing" .. you can check in, but you can't check out. OPC plans to offer some "data sources", including Dun&Bradstreet news feed, Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. It is based on a monthly subscription using a self-service portal. The resources are elastic, with capacity delivered on demand. He claims that Salesforce.com is rate-limited, and cancels long-running jobs if they are consuming too many resources. Larry said OPC would never do that. Larry said that there are private-only offerings like SAP R3, and public-only offerings like Salesforce.com, Workday, and Taleo, but Oracle instead has adopted the IBM model of supporting choice between private, public and hybrid clouds. Larry then attacked "Multi-tenancy", specifically, the idea that SaaS providers often use a single database instance, but then create a column to identify which records belong to which tenants. He said this was state-of-the-art 15 years ago, but is a bad idea now. Too risky. Instead, Larry's OPC has unique database instances for each tenant through virtualization. Larry also announced the Oracle Social Network (OSN). This is a corporate-version of Facebook, that supports collaboration and file-sharing, similar to IBM [LotusLive], Google Docs, or Microsoft Office365. All of the Fusion Apps are written to interface directly with the OSN or any of these other social networks through APIs. This includes navigation and integrated social networking. He also indicated that all Fusion Apps run on mobile devices. He showed the SAP R3 GUI, and said it reminded him of "the fins on a 1968 Cadillac!" Larry said that other CRM SaaS focus on helping sales managers track their employees, but Oracle's CRM helps sellers sell more. He then gave an example of a mythical sales manager Bob, and his sales employee Julian, selling two Exadata boxes for $4.8 Million USD. A "safe harbor" statement was shown at the beginning of this keynote, to make sure nobody asks to buy Exadata boxes this cheap.
Tags:  taleo larry+ellison workday marc+bernioff oracle+public+cloud saas sap smartcloud lotuslive oracle+social+network salesforce.com paas oracle openworld ibm |
Japan and Northern Pacific - Three Months Free
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Visits (8662)
IBM announced that it will offer [three free months of IBM Smart Business Cloud] computing and storage services to government agencies, charitable non-profit organizations, and other organizations involved with reconstruction resulting from the earthquakes and tsunami in Japan and the northern Pacific region. With traditional communications down, and many data centers incapacitated, Cloud Computing can be a great way to resume operations. According to the announcement, organizations can submit their requests now until April 30, and the program will run until July 31, 2011. Options include:
The offer also includes [LotusLive] Soft
Tags:  smart+business+cloud japan tsunami informix lotuslive earthquake ibm linux saas windows lotus db2 websphere |
Day 1 - Monday Keynote sessions
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Visits (9578)
Continuing my coverage of the Data Center 2010 conference, Monday I attended four keynote sessions.
That was just Monday morning, this is going to be an interesting week!
Tags:  big+data ibm mobility paas bpaas green+it facebook bi google virtualization saas iaas gdp twitter cloud+computing cio |
On stacks, appliances and clouds
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Visits (11122)
It seems everyone is talking about stacks, appliances and clouds. On StorageBod, fellow blogger Martin Glassborow has a post titled [Pancakes!] He feels that everyone from Hitachi to Oracle is turning into the IT equivalent of the International House of Pancakes [IHOP] offering integrated stacks of software, servers and storage. Cisco introduced its "Unified Computing System" about a year ago, [reinventing the datacenter with an all-Ethernet approach]. Cisco does not offer its own hypervisor software nor storage, so there are two choices. First, Cisco has entered a joint venture, called Acadia, with VMware and EMC, to form the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition. The resulting stack was named Vblock, which one blogger had hyphenated as Vb-lock to raise awareness to the proprietary vendor lock-in nature of this stack. Second, Cisco, VMware and NetApp had a similar set of [Barney press releases] to announce a viable storage alternative to those not married to EMC. On StorageMojo, fellow blogger Robin Harris presents [A deep dive into Cisco’s UCS]. Here is an excerpt: "Only when it makes sense. Oracle/Sun has the better argument: when you know exactly what you want from your database, we’ll sell you an integrated appliance that will do exactly that. And it’s fine if you roll your own. But those are industry-wide issues. There are UCS/VCE specific issue as well: Similar questions and concerns were raised by others, including Greg Ferro's [Questions I Have About Cisco] and Gestalt IT's [One Year Later: Questioning Cisco UCS]. Fellow blogger Bob Sutor (IBM) has an excellent post titled [Appliances and Linux]. Here is an excerpt:
If your company was a restaurant, how many employees would you have on hand to produce your own electricity from gas generators, pump your own water from a well, and assemble your own toasters and blenders from wires and motors? I think this is why companies are re-thinking the way they do their own IT. Rather than business-as-usual, perhaps a mix of pre-configured appliances, consisting of software, server and storage stacked to meet a specific workload, connected to public cloud utility companies, might be the better approach. By 2013, some analysts feel that as many as 20 percent of companies might not even have a traditional IT datacenter anymore. Fellow blogger David Salgado (Microsoft) rips into the IT industry for [marketing these "stacks" of components as "private clouds"]. Fellow blogger Mary-Jo Foley (Microsoft) asks ['Private cloud' = just another buzzword for on-premise datacenter?"] adds more attention to the confusion over the terms private and public cloud. Here's an excerpt that shows Microsoft's thinking in this area:
Finally, I saw this from fellow blogger, Barry Burke(EMC), aka the Storage Anarchist, titled [a walk through the clouds] which is really a two-part post.
The first part describes a possible future for EMC customers written by EMC employee David Meiri, envisioning a wonderful world with "No more Metas, Hypers, BIN Files...."
The vision is a pleasant one, and not far from reality. While EMC prefers to use the term "private cloud" to refer to both on-premises and off- A good analogy for "private cloud" might be a corporate "intranet" that is accessible only within the company's firewall. This allowed internal websites where information to be disseminated to employees could be posted, using standard HTML and standard web browsers that are already deployed on most PCs and workstations. Web pages running on an intranet can easily be moved to an external-facing website without too much rework or trouble. The second part has Barry claiming that EMC has made progress towards a "Virtual Storage Server" that might be announced at next month's EMC World conference. Seriously? When people hear "Storage Virtualization" most immediately think of the two market leaders, IBM SAN Volume Controller and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Universal Storage Platform (USP) products. Those with a tape bent might throw in IBM's TS7000 virtual tape libraries or Oracle/Sun's Virtual Storage Manager (VSM). And those focused on software-only solutions might recall Symantec's Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM), DataCore's SANsymphony, or FalconStor's IPStor products. But what about EMC's failed attempt at storage virtualization, the Invista? After five years of failing to deliver value, EMC has so far only publicised ONE customer reference account, and I estimate that perhaps only a few dozen actual customers are still running on this platform. Compare that to IBM selling tens of thousands of SAN Volume Controllers, and HDS selling thousands of their various USP-V and USP-VM products, and you quickly realize that EMC has a lot of catching up to do. EMC's first delivered Invista about 18 months after IBM SAN Volume Controller, similar to their introduction of Atmos being 18 months after our Scale-Out File Services (SoFS) and their latest CLARiiON-based V-Max coming out 18 months after IBM's XIV storage system. So what will EMC's Invista follow-on "Virtual Storage Server" product look like? No idea. It might be another five years before you actually hear about a customer using it. But why wait for EMC to get their act together? IBM offers solutions TODAY that can make life as easy as envisioned here. IBM offers integrated systems sold as ready-to-use appliances, customized "stacks" that can be built to handle particular workloads, residing on-premises or hosted at an IBM facility, and public cloud "as-a-service" offerings on the IBM Cloud.
Tags:  appliances invista stacks public+cloud hitachi bob+sutor oracle ethernet emc vce robin+harris barry+burke iaas saas cloud+computing vmware storagebod ihop paas ibm private+cloud storagemojo barney linux cisco netapp martin+glassborow ucs |
Cloud Computing for Accountants
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Visits (11884)
Last week, I presented "An Introduction to Cloud Computing" for two hours to the local Institute of Management Accountants [IMA] for their Continuing Professional Education [CPE]. Since I present IBM's leadership in Cloud Storage offerings, I have had to become an expert in Cloud Computing overall. The audience was a mix of bookkeepers, accountants, auditors, comptrollers, CPAs, and accounting teachers. I have posted my charts on Slideshare.Net: Ima Cloud Computing Mar2010 V8
View more presentations from Tony Pearson. Here is a sample of the questions I took during and after my presentation: ![]()
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IBM offers a variety of Cloud Computing services, as well as customized solutions and integrated systems that can be deployed on-premises behind your corporate firewall. To learn more, go to [ibm.com/cloud]. The second speaker was local celebrity Dan Ryan presenting the financials for the upcoming [Rosemont Copper] mining operations. Copper is needed for emerging markets, such as hybrid vehicles and wind turbines. Copper is a major industry in Arizona.
Tags:  saas rosemont+copper aws eucalyptus cloud+computing amazon paas ibm cpe ima linux ubuntu iaas |
Day3 Mountains Hiding in the Mist
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Visits (9612)
Continuing my coverage of the Data Center Conference 2009, held Dec 1-4 in Las Vegas, the title of this session refers to the mess of "management standards" for Cloud Computing.
The analyst quickly reviewed the concepts of IaaS (Amazon EC2, for example), PaaS (Microsoft Azure, for example), and SaaS (IBM LotusLive, for example). The problem is that each provider has developed their own set of APIs. (One exception was [Eucalyptus], which adopts the Amazon EC2, S3 and EBS style of interfaces. Eucalyptus is an open-source infrastrcture that stands for "Elastic Utility Computing Architecture Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems". You can build your own private cloud using the new Cloud APIs included Ubuntu Linux 9.10 Karmic Koala termed Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC). See these instructions in InformationWeek article [Roll Your Own Ubuntu Private Cloud].) The analyst went into specific Virtual Infrastructure (VI) and public cloud providers.
If you prefer a common management system independent of cloud provider, or perhaps across multiple cloud providers, you may want to consider one of the "Big 4" instead. These are the top four system management software vendors: IBM, HP, BMC Software, and Computer Associates (CA). A survey of the audience found the number one challenge was "integration". How to integrate new cloud services into an existing traditional data center. Who will give you confidence to deliver not tools for remote management of external cloud services? Survey shows:
Some final thoughts offered by the analyst. First, nearly a third of all IT vendors disappear after two years, and the cloud will probably have similar, if not worse, track record. Traditional server, storage and network administrators should not consider Cloud technologies as a death knell for in-house on-premises IT. Companies should probably explore a mix of private and public cloud options.
Tags:  c3 iaas bmc eucalyptus saas ca linux aws eucalyptis azure xen microsoft vcloud+express lotuslive ec2 uec ibm citrix cloudwatch paas amazon vmware+go hp ebs s3 vmware ubuntu |