Oracle Buys Eloqua: Can It Digest Another Cloud-Based App Vendor?
Now that Oracle plans to gobble up yet another company for its growing portfolio of cloud-based software, the question is whether the company can chew everything it puts in its mouth.The business...
View ArticleIF HP Has A Fire Sale, What Should Go?
While Hewlett-Packard says it "continues to evaluate" the sale of underperforming businesses, the company's cash flow problem will make the shedding of assets unavoidable. So what's likely to head to...
View ArticleSAP's HANA Deployment Leapfrogs Oracle, IBM And Microsoft
SAP has taken a big step ahead of rivals IBM, Microsoft and Oracle with the announcement on Thursday that its in-memory database called HANA is now ready to power the German software maker's business...
View ArticleSorry, Larry, But Oracle's Cloud BS Is Wearing Thin
Ruthless competitiveness is what Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison uses to win in business. So no one should be surprised that how he defines the cloud depends on what's needed at the time....
View ArticleBloomberg Billionaires Index Challenges Tech Assumptions
On Wednesday, Bloomberg released a new website for its Bloomberg Billionaires Index, complete with some snappy data visualization tools. While we'd like to see a few more features added to the mix (a...
View ArticleWhy Oracle Fusion Doesn't Excite Customers
In 2006, Oracle promised customers it would always support and update its growing portfolio of business applications. By then it had swallowed PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems and it had to reassure...
View ArticleWho's Right In The Oracle-Forrester Slugfest?
Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison seldom shies away from a fight, so it's no surprise his company came out swinging over an unfavorable Forrester Research report.Forrester certainly struck a nerve...
View ArticleAT&T/Verizon Challenge Tech Companies' Commitment To National Security
The technology industry has been excluded from the government's definition of what constitutes the nation's critical infrastructure, giving them a free pass from regulations. While this may be good for...
View ArticleWhose Fault Is It When Your PC Gets Hacked? Probably Not Microsoft's
Since 2002, when Microsoft launched its Trustworthy Computing initiative, security in the company's products have improved each year. But while the company has increasingly battened down Windows,...
View ArticleOracle's Big Miss: The End Of An Enterprise Era?
For decades the enterprise software industry has grown fat on outsized, upfront license fees coupled with ongoing, high-margin maintenance streams. Cracks in the model have threatened to dismantle the...
View ArticleOracle Flim-Flam Alakazams Missed 3Q Earnings
Magicians work their performances with a combination of talent, slight-of-hand and a lot of misdirection. On stage, a well-orchestrated misdirect is enough to pull off the best illusions. In the...
View ArticleLegacy IT Vendors Shoot The Sales Messenger
Who knew that IBM's sales team was so bad? Or Oracle's? Or Tibco's? In a string of earnings calls, each of these titans of enterprise software put their respective sales teams to the sword, blaming...
View ArticleOracle Adds More Jolt To Java Security Procedures
Oracle is still trying to get its Java house in order with some new policy changes to the application development platform that will hopefully lock down the ever-present security vulnerabilities...
View ArticleDeath By Lawsuit: SCO Resurrects And Insanity Is Restored
If ever we needed confirmation that markets, not courtrooms, should decide the technologies we use, witness SCO Group's reborn dream to sue all of UNIX-dom into its wallet. It was a specious lawsuit in...
View ArticleOracle Makes More Big Promises After Missed 4Q Earnings
It's classic Larry Ellison: earnings for his company showing weakness? The CEO of Oracle will blame the market. Or try to distract investors with promises of better things to come.During yesterday's...
View ArticleRivals Microsoft And Oracle Join Forces To Ward Off Cloud Upstarts
Longtime rivals Microsoft and Oracle are combining cloud efforts to stave off competition from a slew of smaller companies with cheaper offerings that are slowly eclipsing the corporate giants, Reuters...
View ArticleMicrosoft/Oracle: A Yawner That Could Have Been Much More
If someone has to forewarn you that "BIG NEWS IS COMING!", rest assured that no big news is coming. That's what I thought when Oracle CEO Larry Ellison tried to soften another round of poor earnings...
View ArticleOracle And Salesforce Bury The Hatchet—Surprisingly, Not In The Others' Back
Say this for Larry Ellison. He can sometimes shoot off his mouth and piss people off, but when things get tough, he'll do whatever it takes to push Oracle forward and set things right for his...
View ArticleSalesforce.com Abandoning Its Postgres Flirtation?
As brinkmanship goes, few can compete with Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff or Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. While the world oohed and aahed over the dynamic duo's nine-year partnership announced last week,...
View ArticleIt's Official: Legacy Tech Vendors Are In Permanent Decline
SAP has missed key financial projections five times in the last 10 quarters. Oracle has whiffed four times in the last seven quarters. IBM has done better, but has tripped over earnings and revenue in...
View ArticleMySQL Vs. MariaDB: Power Plays By Expanding Communities
MariaDB, the open source fork of the popular MySQL relational database, is slowly but surely making inroads in the MySQL user base by building a stronger community. Clear evidence of that comes with...
View ArticleRed Hat To Oracle: Have You Tried Free?
Oracle probably isn't the first company that comes to mind when words like "austerity" are used. Perhaps for that very reason Oracle president Mark Hurd recently took to the blog-o-sphere to argue that...
View ArticleGoogle Waves Goodbye To MySQL In Favor Of MariaDB
In physics, the law of conservation of energy holds that energy can neither be created or destroyed, it can only be transferred from one form to another. In business terms, this natural law can also...
View ArticleOracle Plays Catch-Up With New 'In-Memory' Database Technology
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison talked up the release of Oracle's new in-memory database technology Sunday night in his opening keynote of Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, but was oddly non-confrontational...
View ArticleOracle Reverses Course, Embraces Cloud Before Its Customers All Flee
Five years after Larry Ellison called hype about cloud computing "complete gibberish," his company announced no less than 10 cloud computing services during the Oracle OpenWorld show yesterday.Ellison...
View ArticleNews Flash: Oracle Still Hates Open Source Software
It's no wonder that Google, Red Hat and others have been abandoning Oracle's most visible open-source project, MySQL. After all, Oracle has a highly conflicted relationship with open source. Nowhere is...
View ArticleOracle Claims Second-Largest Software Company Title
Yesterday's rather unpleasant IBM 3Q earnings report did little to shake the conventional wisdom that IBM is in need of some serious mojo to turn itself around as software and hardware revenue...
View ArticleIn The Age Of Twitter, Do We Need Oracle? Larry Ellison Isn't Sure
Twitter is off to a roaring start this week, closing 70% higher than its IPO price on its first day of trading. This bodes well for Twitter investors, but it may not do any favors to the traditional...
View ArticleGoogle And Oracle Set For Round 2 In Java Copyright Case
Google once again is set to battle Oracle in court over how it used the Java programming language in building its Android mobile operating system. Oracle, which lost a patent and copyright battle to...
View ArticleMaybe Oracle Isn't The MySQL Villain So Many People Think
For those still struggling to understand open source, the fracas over Oracle's handling of MySQL won't help. When Oracle acquired Sun in 2010, open sourcerors (including me) worried that Oracle would...
View Article2014: When The Enterprise vs. Consumer Distinction Will Die
ReadWritePredict is a look ahead at the technology trends and companies that will shape the coming year.Well, that was a fun year for the enterprise. What will 2014 have in store? More of the same, to...
View ArticleOracle's Quixotic Quest To Beat Amazon At The Commodity Game
It has been a few weeks since Oracle CEO Larry Ellison publicly challenged Amazon Web Services (AWS), declaring that Oracle would be "price competitive" in the "commodity infrastructure as a service...
View ArticleThe Cloud Is Tempting CIOs To Change Their Tech Vendors
Something big is happening, and Cloudera's recent raise of $160 million is just one indication of many that the technology industry is undergoing a tectonic shift.In a recent global survey of CIOs,...
View ArticleWhy Oracle Needs To Embrace WebScaleSQL
In theory, Oracle owns the code for MySQL, which is still the world's most popular open-source database. By acquiring Sun in 2009, which had previously bought MySQL for $1 billion, Oracle took control...
View ArticleHP Wants To Be Your OpenStack Vendor
OpenStack is an open-source vehicle for rapidly provisioning data center resources, and it's becoming one of the biggest movements in enterprise IT in years. HP wants it to be theirs, and the company...
View ArticleChilling Effect: Oracle Wins Appeal to Copyright APIs
The federal appeals court that handles U.S. intellectual property cases ruled that APIs can be copyrighted, a finding that may have significant consequences for cloud computing, software...
View ArticleMore Than Java: What's Really At Stake In Google And Oracle's Copyright Case
The Platform is a regular column by mobile editor Dan Rowinski. Ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence and pervasive networks are changing the way humans interact with everything. Any artist that's...
View ArticleDo Fortune 500 Firms Really Operate Like Startups? Not On The Tech Front
Big companies talk about "operating like a startup," but few actually do. Hamstrung by bureaucracy and organizational friction, the Fortune 500 make lots of money but generally play it safe with...
View ArticleWhat Oracle Could Learn From Microsoft About The Cloud
Oracle still doesn't get cloud computing. At Oracle OpenWorld this week, there were signs that Oracle was making serious changes to its business model, embracing cloud computing in a way that it...
View ArticleWhy The Older-Than-Dirt Postgres Database Is Hot With Hipsters And Oldsters...
Boring has never looked so cool. The decades-old relational-database management system Postgres, once the forgotten older sibling to MySQL, has been on a tear the last few years. Postgres has Oracle to...
View ArticleThe Big Risk To Big Data's Elite: The Old Guard Strikes Back
Big Data promises to completely change the world. What it might not do, however, is change the enterprise technology scoreboard of winners and losers.It has become de rigueur to read eulogies for...
View ArticleApplications Drive The Biggest Money In Big Data
We're still fixating on all the wrong Big Data startups. Hortonworks, one of the primary companies behind Hadoop, recently went public to great fanfare and a $1.2 billion valuation. But Hortonworks and...
View ArticleHow Open Source Succeeds In The Cloud—It Trades Freedom For Simplicity
Those new to open source won’t remember just how much of the early code amounted to little more than crappy-but-free clones of popular proprietary products. Boy, how times have changed.Open source,...
View ArticleSupreme Court Refuses To Decide If APIs Are Copyrightable
The U.S. Supreme Court has denied an appeal from Google in its ongoing legal battle with Oracle over software copyright. The move means that the search giant, which argues that its reliance on Oracle's...
View ArticleMeritocracy, My Back End
Tom Hogan is the cofounder of Crowded Ocean, a marketing agency for startups.Back in the early '90s, I worked at Oracle as the company’s first creative director. These were heady days, with the first...
View ArticleAmazon's Cloud Business Is Worth At Least $70 Billion
Two years ago VMware president Carl Eschenbach snidely suggested that he found it "really hard to believe that we cannot ... beat a company that sells books." Two years later, the truth has become...
View ArticleAndroid N To Use Oracle’s OpenJDK For Java APIs
News from a “mysterious Android codebase commit” has revealed that Google is replacing its implementation of the Java application programming interfaces (APIs) in Android N with OpenJDK, the open...
View ArticleZapier Introduces Multi-Step Zaps
This month Zapier announced their new Multi-Step Zaps. If you're not already familiar with Zapier, it's a handy automation platform which syncs apps (a process they call zaps), enabling them to talk to...
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