Oracle OpenWorld Highlights New Hardware

ellison-exalytics

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison during his opening keynote Sunday night at Oracle OpenWorld. (Photo: Oracle Corp.)

Oracle's OpenWorld 2011 opened in San Francisco Monday with a flurry of crowds and press announcements. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison delivered the opening keynote with the theme of The Power of Parallel-Everywhere Architecture. "When we first bought Sun, a lot of people said we would get out of the hardware business,"  Ellison said. "I guess we didn't get the memo."

Ellison announced Oracle's newest engineered system: the Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine, which provides extreme in-memory analytics performance. Ellison said Oracle Exalytics handles relational and multidimensional data and analyzes unstructured data—in any combination—at the speed of thought. The new machine clocked an average response-time improvement of 18x, and a 23x improvement when used with Oracle Exadata.

Big Data Appliance

Oracle (ORCL) announced the Oracle Big Data Appliance Monday to help customers integrate and maximize the value of Big Data.  The new appliance, in conjunction with Oracle Exadata Database Machine and the new Oracle Exalytics Business Machine, is designed to provide users with more power to process and analyze huge datasets. The Oracle Big Data Appliance is a new engineered system that includes an open source distribution of Apache Hadoop, Oracle NoSQL Database, Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop, Oracle Loader for Hadoop, and an open source distribution of R.

"With the explosion of data in the past decade, including more machine-generated data and social data, companies are faced with the challenge of acquiring, organizing and analyzing this data to make better business decisions," said Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president, Oracle Server Technologies. "New technologies, such as Hadoop, offer some relief, but don’t provide a holistic solution for customers’ Big Data needs. With today’s announcement, Oracle becomes the first vendor to offer customers a complete and integrated set of products to address critical Big Data requirements, unlock efficiencies, simplify management and create data insights that maximize business value.”

Oracle Exastack

Oracle announced the expansion of its three month old Exastack Program with the availability of Oracle Exastack Optimized, enabling Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and other qualifying members of Oracle Partner Network (OPN) to optimize their applications to run faster and more reliably on Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. Oracle also announced the availability of Exastack Remote Labs that gives access to technical resources and remote lab environments to OPN members. Oracle Exastack Ready has also added an Oracle VM Ready status, differentiating for customers the OPN member applications that support the latest major release of Oracle VM.

"Customers around the globe continue to turn to Informatica for solutions to tackle their most challenging data integration and big data challenges," said Sachin Chawla, senior vice president, Data Integration, Informatica. "By achieving Oracle Exadata Ready status, organizations can confidently use Informatica™ products together with Oracle Exadata Database Machine offerings in a secure, highly-available enterprise offering."

Oracle also announced that its applications are fully optimized for Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. This integration is optimized across the Oracle Application Suite of PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel CRM.  "By optimizing the integration with Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle is not only enabling extreme performance, reliability and availability across its complete application solutions, but also delivering new capabilities that directly support line of business managers," said Steve Miranda, SVP of Application Development, Oracle.

Record Partner Network Attendance

With over 4,500 Oracle Partner Network attendees at OpenWorld Oracle gave their thanks and kicked off a week of partner programming and networking opportunities. Oracle launched new resources for Enterprise Manager 12c to help partners leverage Oracle's IT management solution. Oracle listed the ten partners achieving the highest level in the Partner Network Specialized program, diamond status:  Accenture, Capgemini, CSC, Deloitte, Fujitsu, IBM, Infosys, PwC,  and Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. “We continue to grow our portfolio of products as well as enablement partner programs – giving partners the tools, technology and knowledge they need to compete and win in the marketplace," said Judson Althoff, Oracle Senior Vice President of Worldwide Alliances & Channels and Embedded Sales.

Oracle recognized their partners for their commitment to deliver innovative, specialized solutions and services based on Oracle software and hardware.  Global awards were presented to such partners as Cintra Software and Services for database partner of the year, Deloitte for Middleware partner of the year and Capgemini UK Pic for Applications partner of the year.

This Thursday Oracle executives will outline Oracle's comprehensive cloud strategy and roadmap. The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #oow11