I’m here in San Francisco for Oracle Open World. Just arrived, but I already have some first impressions.

1. There are signs, billboards, and brochures boasting about Oracle’s commitment to integrated hardware and software. This is the ultimate irony to an industry old-timer like me as Oracle led the open systems charge in the 1990s, lambasting Digital Equipment and IBM for its autocratic systems control. I’ll have to poke around for some old Oracle ads and compare them to its new integrated stack mantra.
2. VMware is here and if I stop by its booth, I get a free espresso. Funny thing is that as far as I know, Oracle doesn’t support its apps or databases running on top of VMware. Based upon ESG Research, I believe that within two years or so, large organizations will run Oracle virtualization infrastructure to run Oracle workloads next to VMware, Xen, or Hyper-V workloads. When this happens, I can’t imagine VMware will be very visible at Oracle Open World, let alone spring for coffee.
3. Rumor has it that Oracle will either announce its own Ethernet switch or buy one of the remaining independents. Personally, I hope Oracle doesn’t go down this road and decides to work with everyone else.
4. I fully expect Oracle to jump much deeper into the security waters. This is becoming a requirement for being in the systems business.
5. Michael Dell spoke this morning about virtualization in the data center. Application and database folks used to refer to this stuff as “plumbing.” Why do they care now? Because distributed applications with huge Hadoop backends need to be tuned with virtual servers, networks, and storage IO in mind.
6. I’m looking for Oracle to be one of the leaders that transform today’s monolithic enterprise-focused identity management technology to a more Web-friendly democratic model.
7. It’s funny that after Larry ripped apart cloud computing as nothing but industry hype, many vendors are here at OOW preaching, you guessed it, cloud computing.

More soon, time to walk the floor and get indoctrinated.

Related posts:

1. Oracle Server Virtualization: The Quiet Killer Technology
2. Networking and Virtualization Vendors Should Join the Open vSwitch Effort
3. Oracle, Sun, and the Identity Management Waiting Game
4. Heterogeneous Server Virtualization
5. Goodbye Scott McNealy and Thanks for the Memories

Tags: Cloud Computing, Dell, Digital Equipment, IBM, identity management, Larry Ellison, Oracle, Oracle Open World, Sun Microsystems