Larry Ellison at Dreamforce?

This is completely speculation on my part but I was wondering if Larry Ellison has any intention of speaking at Dreamforce the same way that Marc Benioff spoke at Oracle Open World.  Might be fun but keep in mind that this speculation.  If you have any information I would love to hear it.

The Ellison Biography

The Oracle Sales Executive Summit 2009 that I attended during Open World attracted senior sales talent from major corporations and many of them spoke about their experiences and successes with Oracle CRM and SFA products.  All of the speakers’ biographies were printed in a handout and, since the session included a live feed from Larry Ellison’s keynote, his biography was also included.

It read in full:

Lawrence J. Ellison

Chief Executive Officer

Oracle Corporation

Larry Ellison has been CEO of Oracle Corporation since he founded the company in 1977.  He also races sailboats, flies planes, and plays tennis and guitar.

‘nuff said.

Key findings from Open World #1

This is the first of several posts on Open World.  Too much stuff to put into one so this one concentrates on blurbs of key findings from the many goings on.  I will probably need to expand on many of these.

First, flying Virgin America is like flying used to be.  Room for my knee caps is a plus, wi-fi, better food, uncrowded departure lounges, and security lines no cattle call for boarding.  My first time and I am spoiled.

Why does Larry Ellison wait until Wednesday to give his keynote.  Some people are already on their ways home by that point and they miss the significant news.

So many Oracle people walking around visibly tired by Wednesday as am I.  The sheer volume of news, presentations, briefings, meetings, demos and trying to digest it all is too much.  Tuesday night I was too tired to eat dinner.  Too tired?!  But I have pity on the Oracle people who keep a stiff upper lip and keep up this pace.  My prediction is few people in their offices on Monday.

Arnold Schwarzenegger gives a good speech, much less wooden in person, almost life-like.  Arnold really likes technology and if he could have gotten ten bucks for every time he used the word in his speech at OOW he could have balanced California’s budget.

If Carley gets elected governor will Larry invite her to OOW?  Would she come?  Larry will own Sun by then and Carley ran HP.  Hmmm.

OOW was a little cat and mouse game on the inside track.  Larry criticizing Cloud Computing at the Churchill Club followed by Marc Benioff walking into the lion’s den on Tuesday to extol its virtues and then Larry’s introduction of Fusion apps on Wednesday.

Larry played cat and mouse with IBM too challenging Big Blue to a gun fight over benchmarks.  He offered a ten million dollar prize to anyone who could best his sparc server array. Pure chutzpa, the Sun deal isn’t even closed yet and Larry’s got a dog in the fight.  Is this the beginning of the Ellison prize?

I am not a gear head but the gear introductions were impressive. Exadata 2 based on Sparc technology is twice as fast as version 1 which uses HP.  Version 1 was ONLY about 50 times (sic) faster than the fastest database servers on the planet.  Proof that Larry is slowing down LOL!

Larry (finally) announced Fusion applications on Wednesday.  He made four major announcements – Fusion, Exadata 2, a sophisticated service and support automated system that would find problems and recommend fixes for all subscribing customers proactively and Oracle Enterprise Linux rules the known universe or some such thing.  More on those coming soon.

Benioff Attends Open World

Well, that was interesting.  Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff just completed a speech at Oracle Open World, perhaps the ultimate example of co-opetition.  It was apparent to me early on that Marc’s purpose for being there was to refute Larry Ellison’s rant at the Churchill Club in which he compared Cloud Computing to vapor.

I got a hint earlier today when someone said that the event had been put together quickly, which to me confirmed the need to refute Larry who spoke a couple of weeks ago at Churchill.  Benioff started out by graciously telling the audience that he had worked at Oracle and attended Open World many times in his 13-year career, even presenting on the same stage he was now on.  He went further pointing out that the Oracle database is one of the key components of the Salesforce service and thanked Oracle executives for the graciousness.

But there was little doubt in my mind that Benioff felt he needed to refute Ellison’s off the cuff assertions at the Churchill Club.  He did that with ease and just when you might have thought he’d reached the end of his talk, he brought up the CIO of EMC Corporation Sanjay Mirchandani to discuss that company’s hybrid CRM approach that includes Salesforce and Oracle for on-premise CRM.  It was almost as if he wanted to say that Salesforce can play the hybrid game as well as Oracle.

I guess the Open World setting proved too much of a temptation for Benioff.  It’s in the same city as Benioff’s office.  The venue was easy to get, Michael Dell another big Salesforce customer spoke at Open World this morning and was available to be on stage with Benioff for part of the afternoon.

There’s little doubt that Benioff was able to refute Ellison but the bigger question for me was why he felt he needed to.  We haven’t seen this kind of action for many years and it makes for lively times in these challenging days.

Both sides now

As luck would have it, I knew nothing about Larry Ellison’s rant at the Churchill Club on September 21 about cloud computing when I wrote last week’s piece on cloud computing.  I saw it on YouTube.

You have to admit that Larry is a heck of a showman and the video is fun to watch.  But whenever someone in that kind of situation starts to nit pick over definitions it says to me that they’re hoping no one will notice that they might be a bit threatened by a next generation technology.

Various analysts have pointed out the cloud is really an amalgamation of several technologies including Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).  I can’t disagree with any of that though it is a rather mechanistic summation, but my reaction to all this parsing of nomenclature is, so what.

Say what?

Really, so what.

My take on cloud computing is different, it’s part cultural and part historic and the two are twisted tightly together.  The history of the technology industry is one of overcoming shortages and cloud computing is part of that progression.

When storage and memory were in relative short supply we kept data on tape and programs on punch cards.  We responded by building more and denser capacity until the shortage went away and we found ourselves with extra capacity at greatly lower costs.  We had capacity to spare and instead of wasting it, clever individuals built the relational database.

Computing power has always been short but once we got into Moore’s Law the curve kept delivering new capacity to burn every eighteen months or so.  Did we waste it?  Some did, but enterprising souls built the graphical user interface of GUI and graphics cards and they changed computing.

Along the way as these improvements became ubiquitous and cheap — then something magical happened.  We started branching out and the improvements didn’t stay in the confines of enterprise computing.  They leaked out into a plethora of unimaginable products.  Consider the iPod, for example, nothing but a tiny computer with a baby-sized disk.  Talk about unintended consequences, I know some people were thinking about these devices but there weren’t that many and look at the effect this one device has had on our culture.

iPod is only the best known example but there are many others.  For example, our cars are now bristling with processors and memory for fuel injection, ABS brakes, navigation systems (probably with a DVD in your trunk) and more.

But we are not done.

Then it was bandwidth.  Ethernet was an interesting standard but it was slow.  Bright minds turned their attention to networking, changed the way our applications use networks so that they use less bandwidth and others made more of it available culminating in the ultimate consumer bandwidth, the Internet.  Tell me that hasn’t changed your life.

What’s different today is that we have a relative abundance of everything.  If it comes to us as a service we no longer think about all of the provisioning and cost that was once part of our calculus.  Platforms and applications coming in as a service ensure that bright minds can dream big and who knows what they’ll come up with?

So far all of that abundance has enabled us to build not artificial intelligence, that appears to still be in the future, but artificial, or should I say synthetic, relationships.  I mean social media here.  The relationships we maintain through social media are available to us because the cost of maintaining them in time and effort and real dollars is so low that it might as well be free.  And the power of these relationships is that at any time, for the right reason, they can become full blown active relationships that provide friendship, information, help or anything you might expect of a friendship.  And, of course, physical distance is much less of an issue than ever.

Our advances in technology have been the sometimes-surprising results of efforts to overcome scarcity and other adversities.  Social media is a child of the ubiquity delivered through the Internet and it is still in its precocious early years.  And logically, social media is not the only advance we should expect from this ubiquity, though I can’t say what the next things will be.

So when I hear someone, even kiddingly, say that cloud computing is nothing new or that it’s just water vapor, it makes me think that someone isn’t getting it.  We only have a few faint ideas about what cloud computing will ultimately yield and that alone is why it is so important.