CloudExpo 2010 NYC: Opening Keynote from Oracle Disappoints

The opening keynote for CloudExpo 2010 NYC was delivered by Richard Sarwal and Hasan Rizvi, SVPs of Product Development for Oracle Corporation. The title of the presentation was “The Coming of Age of Enerprise IT and Cloud Computing.”

Disclosure: I used to work for Oracle from 1989-1993, have consulted for them on selected projects since, and have many friends that still work there.

Mr. Sarwal started off the session by pointing out that in a recent survey of enterprise CIOs, cloud computing is second in importance only to virtualization (sorry, the screen type was so small, I don’t have the source for that survey). He then went on to explain what makes cloud computing possible: zero-cost computing, ubiquitous shared storage, high bandwidth networking, and virtualization.

Next, Mr. Sarwal defined cloud computing using an acronym, ICE, which stands for Isolation, Consolidation, and Elasticity. Following up on this, he explained each area. Personally, I think his definition is complicated and confusing, and tailored to suit the goals of Oracle Corporation. I like The Cloud View’s definition of cloud computing much better, but then again, I’m biased because it’s my definition.

Oracle believes that private clouds will rule the enterprise for the foreseeable future and the company’s cloud computing strategy revolves around this belief.

In the next segment of the session, Mr. Sarwal explained that Oracle believes that private clouds will rule the enterprise for the foreseeable future, intimating that public clouds would not be as important. Oracle’s strategy, then, is:

• to make sure that cloud computing is enterprise grade
• to support both public and private clouds

Mr. Sarwal then went on to say that Oracle’s existing products are cloud-ready and have been for a long time. He pointed to several examples of how they provision software for Oracle University classes and internal development environments using Oracle’s cloud-like technology.

In the second part of the keynote session, Mr. Rizvi presented some slides that identified key pain points for enterprise application deployments, including the requirement to support heterogeneous environments, low server utilization, and the complexities of multi-tier application designs. This was followed by a slide showing that Oracle delivers the foundation for private platform as a service (PaaS), pointing to products up and down the application stack including Oracle VM, Oracle Linux/Solaris, JRocket, Coherence, Oracle Enterprise Manager, Tuxedo, and Weblogic.

I was left disappointed by Oracle’s continued lack of innovation for cloud computing. Oracle seems to be repackaging, tweaking, and making slight additions to existing products so that they can sell them using traditional sales methods to customers that want to build clouds or applications for clouds.

The next part of the presentation was a couple of product announcements. Please go to the links to learn more about each product.

• The first announcement was for Oracle WebLogic Suite Virtualization Option. I chuckled when this announcement was made because I knew from my days at BEA that this “new” product was born from BEA WebLogic Virtual Edition, a product that BEA released in 2008.
• The second announcement was for Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder, a product that to me seems similar to products from rPath and Elastra. But I’ll have to do some more reading before I form my complete opinions.

In summary, I was left disappointed by Oracle’s continued lack of innovation for cloud computing. Oracle seems to be repackaging, tweaking, and making slight additions to existing products so that they can sell them using traditional sales methods to customers that want to build clouds or applications for clouds.