Quo Vadis Oracle?

Last week I saw something I though would never witness. I really believed that Larry would die as the CEO of Oracle, but in a quite surprising decision, he stepped down as the CEO of his beloved company.

Well, I was surprised, but I must confess that as a competitor of Oracle, I'm delighted!

Cheers Larry! Enjoy retirement.

Why it is so? Well, in the case of Safra Catz, I will not say much. She has been around Oracle for a long time, so maybe all the finance situation of the company was already being managed by her. However, although she seems to have been the "deal maker" after Oracle's acquisitions, I doubt she was the one deciding which companies to buy or not, as I have the feeling that it was Larry in person who made the important decisions, and Safra just executed. Of course, this is just my personal opinion, as in my tenure at Oracle I never had such a high level contact with the management.

With Mark Hurd things are different, in my opinion. I was very surprised when he was hired by Larry. After all, he was the man that drove HP to irrelevancy, and that practically destroyed the R+D at HP. Some people say that he just brought order to the financial situation of the company, and that he infused discipline to a company that was quite "anarchic", but, I think that he nearly destroyed the company and just lead them to be irrelevant. I am not saying they are not making money, but they are not relevant. They moved to a business where they are just competing in services and low margin servers and PCs, a field where they just compete with the Dells and Lenovos of the world, which is a legit business, of course, but it is far from the innovative philosophy that identified HP from the very beginning, and its margins are quite narrower than with top notch technology.
Indeed, when Hurd left HP, I heard a rumor saying that he had been fired because all the people at HP were tired of him and how he was destroying the company's spirit... But that is just a rumor.

During my tenure at Oracle, some of the guys that had been working there since the old times, remembered how Oracle used to be a great company for engineers, and how they were devoted to solving customer's problems. And how the technical knowledge was really rewarded. It seems everything changed more or less after they acquired Peoplesoft. Since then, the company has changed to be just sales oriented, techies are not so valued anymore, and the pressure to just sell and close the deals, propagates from top to bottom, no matter what the customer really needs, no matter if the technology is not good: they just have to close the deal and fulfill the selling objectives.
In my opinion this is quite dangerous in the long term. For instance, last year Larry in person announced the desired in-memory option for Oracle Database 12c. The good news here is that Mark could repeat this year in the Oracle World the same speech Larry did in the event last year, as one year after, it seems that Oracle finally was able to finally release that option (even though I heard many customers have already been paying for this in advance, when it was not ready at all).
The situation I witnessed at Oracle is that they are so sure their customers will not go away, that they are not investing in R+D and innovation what a company like Oracle should be doing. I remember some funny conversations with the product managers of several products that may illustrate this point very clearly, but I'll keep them to myself (or maybe for another blog entry... ;-) ).
In any case, my point here is that Oracle is quite sure that customers will keep buying from them, mainly in the database space, because they are so trapped that they cannot go anywhere else. And as they cannot go anywhere, they just keep squeezing the cash-cow they think their customers are, to fulfill their cash objectives. And sometimes it is true. Sometimes customers willing to change because they find abusive what they pay for maintenance or licenses for a commodity product, cannot go away because they made the mistake of build all the provisioning scripts in pl/sql, and migrating that code to a different database is more expensive than paying Oracle the fee. Or the core of their business is so trapped into Oracle products that a migration would risk their business at all. So they stay with Oracle. By now.

However, as I said, this is the short term. In the long term, customers are realizing that there are other options, at a fraction of the cost of an Oracle system, sometimes with better performance. There you have DB2, the NoSQL options, the more specialized products such as PureData for Analytics (Netezza) for the DataWarehouse or the MySQL llikes. Indeed, this is one of the three reasons why I believe Larry bought Sun: (1) Owning Java, (2) trying to become IBM with a hardware division, and most of all, (3) not allowing MySQL eroding the Oracle's install base.

A PureData for Analytics
(I know it doesn't have to do with the post, but I like the picture and the PDA)

As a sample, this is how we advertised MySQL at Sun: "90% Oracle's functionality, 10% the cost". And we had a lot of traction in the market. And then they bought Sun. And increased the cost of maintenance and licenses of MySQL...

Another sample of my experience with Oracle and Mark Hurd. Just after the integration, they replaced my "old" VAIO laptop with a standard approved Oracle laptop, a Dell one, with a 64 bit processor. Of course, the operating system was 32 bits, so I was not able to use all the memory and features of the laptop. I asked my manager about the new Windows 7 Oracle edition for internal use, which was not yet available, so he told me to follow the official procedure to get the software: basically, requesting Mr. Hurd permission to use Windows 7 in my laptop. I took this as a NO, I would not dare asking that to the president of the company... so I ended up installing SuSE Linux, of course. This is just anecdotal, but shows the way of doing things that Hurd is imposing at Oracle. Just cutting every cost, just selling to customers, no matter how.

So, in the long term, with no more innovation in their products, with customers getting angrier and angrier as they just see the bill increasing for no reason, and R+D going the way the HP's R+D were, well, for an Oracle's competitor like me, appointing Hurd (and Catz) as co-CEOs, are just great news.

If you want to read a less passionate article describing the new CEOs, you can click the following link.

Back to the blog.

Well, September is almost over, everybody is back from holidays, so I thought it was about time to come back too to this blog.
I had not realized that so many time have gone since my last posting here, but to my defense I have to argue that I have been quite busy at work, which is something I really have to thank, giving the circumstances of the economy. Anyway, I'll try to be around more often and not use the excess of work as the excuse not to be here. Even more, in the same way that I started blogging as part of my regular job at Sun, I'll be also writing from now on the IBM's official blog, as I'll be publishing regularly in the Enterprise Integrated Systems, or EIS for short.
For now, here you have the link to my first article in this blog. And, this is not a menace, it will not be the last post on that platform.

As you may expect, the content of the articles published on the IBM blog will be related to IBM's product and technology, usually those I work with, while here, in my own blog, I'll publish about the technology I like or interests me, independently of the maker. And of course, being this my blog I'll keep on publishing about what I feel like in every moment, being it technology, computers or any other subject.
I really hope you like what you see here, and that you find what you were looking for when you came here.

Quantum computing according to Dilbert

Scott Adams is just great, I had to link to this:

http://www.dilbert.com/2012-04-17/

My intention is to write (soon) about quantum computing. I guess this is a fine introduction (more serious than it seems).

Sold out!

I know, I know, this is really old news, but I thought it was just appropriate to justify why I have been so long without writing anything around here: We ran out of Netezzas in December.

Fortunately for our customers this only meant that they had to wait a little longer than expected to get their machine, but just that. And this is what had me away for so long, out beloved customers.

Honestly, I am sure this is a problem all of our competitors would like to have, don't you think so?

IBM-Netezza and ESRI: Geospatial Data Analysis

I have always paid a lot of attention to the world of GIS and its applications. Today, ESRI is the major player dominating the world of GIS, thanks to its innovative products and understanding of the needs of its customers. This is why the announcement made in October by Esri and IBM-Netezza is so important. I'll try to explain here why and what it means.

One of the challenges of the systems handling geographical data is the analysis of that data when it reaches certain amount. While current databases can store as many terabytes of information as we need, and storage is becoming cheaper and cheaper, the problem arise when we need to analyze this data, as it takes a lot of resources and a lot of time -not only analyzing it, also moving the data-, making some analysis just impossible to perform. What usually happens is that customers only analyze samples of data, so the results achieved are not satisfactory at all.

This is when Netezza and ESRI partner together to find a solution to this problem. When you put together the leader in data-warehouse analysis and the leader in GIS solutions, something wonderful has to come out!

This announcement brings you the promise of an easy way of analysis of massive amounts of geospatial data and all in a timely fashion. But, this is something you already can achieve with Netezza...

So, what does all it mean? I'll try to explain it in detail, answering some typical questions.

What about Netezza and Spatial data, does Netezza support it?

Yes, Netezza is able to store spatial data, as it uses the Open Geospatial Consortium Simple Feature Specification. So, Netezza is able to store and understand natively spatial data: point, lines, polygons, multipoint, multiline, multypolygon...

What about Spatial Functions?

Today you can find about 90 spatial operations included in Netezza, executed as any other SQL function, but taking profit of the massive parallel multiprocessor architecture of Netezza. In upcoming versions, the number and complexity of functions, as long as the kind of spatial data stores, will increase.

So, does it work only with ESRI?

Not only with ESRI, as it is a standard implementation, it works with any GIS that fulfills the standard, including opensource products, but the relation with ESRI is special.

Why is the relation with ESRI Special?

The relation with ESRI is a long term one, as ESRI supports Netezza as data storage from a long time, and ESRI provides a native connector for Netezza (ArcView, ArcCatalog, etc.).

Ok, but, what is the cost of it?

There is no additional cost. It is included in Analytics, and Analytics is included in Netezza. You buy Netezza, and it is all included, at no additional cost: Analytics and Spatial. No hidden costs, no surprises.

So, what are ESRI and IBM-Netezza announcing?

A very interesting advance in geospatial analysis. So far, ESRI or any other GIS software can use Netezza as a repository of their data, taking advantage of the astounding speed Netezza provides serving queries. But, in this case, what ESRI and IBM are announcing is the inclusion of several ESRI libraries into the Analytics package of Netezza. This way, instead of extracting data from Netezza and then perform the complex calculations in the server containing the ESRI software, part of those calculations can be done in-database, inside Netezza, as it already will contain the libraries and functions to be performed by ESRI: at the end of the day, Netezza is a kind of parallel supercomputer, so, why not taking advantage of it? And what is more interesting, at no additional cost.

If you want to download a paper describing Spatial in detail, follow this link, and register for free.

Impressed? You could be more impressed, as you may ask for a trial for free (or just call your local IBM-Netezza representative).

As Netezza says: your data, your facilities, our appliance.

Sun memorabilia

During my tenure at Sun, I was able to collect a series of stuff identified with the Sun brand. I guess that many customers just came to our shows to get some of the archetypal Sun mugs, starting with the classical Java mug

Mugs against "Technology Craziness" (I guess this is a post-dot-com mug)

And of course the mugs delivered for the local edition of the Java Expo, a re-known event, probably the most famous in the IT sector in Spain in the early 2000s

The other mug is a general branding mug with the inscription "Conecta 2" (Connected).

Another fine mug is this pair advertising the "Mainframe Rehosting" program from Sun, that tried to erode the IBM's mainframe market (with no success, by the way), but the mugs are just great (as the mainframes are...)

Another mug I like very much is this one, from StorageTek, including an anti-sliding base and prepared to keep your coffee warm

A fine collection I'm proud to have, as you can see

In another occasion I'll show you my t-shirts collection (some of my mates thought Sun was an apparel company...). To close this post, I'll show you another amazing Sun piece of merchandising the Sun car:

Well, it is smaller than it seems, but is quite useful though:

Hope you enjoyed.

Marathon Woman!

In many of the companies I've worked for, my mates were very concerned about their fitness, and in some of them they were real fans of running, participating in amateur marathons and popular races.
At IBM it is different: as everything we do at IBM, we take things quite seriously. I can say that my mates take running almost as a profession, and I give you here an example. I'd like you to meet Pilar:

Pilar, training with her husband Galo

She is not only a marathon woman, she is a work mate (a very busy one!) and a mother of family, a person I really admire, full of energy and optimism. You can follow her on her blog, where she is describing how she is preparing her New York Marathon (she finds time to attend meetings at the office, presentations with her sponsor, training for the competition, and of course quality time for her family, just amazing!). And not only that, after competing in New York, she will go to THE marathon: the Athens Marathon! I really envy her.
Go Pilar, we support you!