I was at Marc Benioff’s subversive non-keynote at Oracle OpenWorld yesterday, and while it was fun to see all the hoopla (employees holding posters of Benioff cast as a dissident, shouting, honking, donuts, cocktails), it was also cool to have the "I was there when" moment as Oracle’s future biggest competitor draws the lines of battle that are likely to shape the enterprise software industry for the next decade. Truth be told, I think that Benioff was a bit too caught up in the fuss and the cloudwash to make me think he’s a mature and credible competitor yet, but he is clearly getting his gumption up.

Benioff pointed a finger at Exadata as a new mainframe, locking customers into proprietary hardware and forcing them to buy over-expensive gear from an industry monolith. He described his own company as “open,” allowing customers to move to any platform or any cloud; "philanthropic," donating $24 million in grants and using their OOW booth as an engine for giving; and "social," leveraging their internal social media engine Chatter to coordinate their rapid mobilization to deliver the non-keynote within 16 hours of being cancelled by Larry. And all of that is cool, but I think he skewed to tech industry buzz rather than focus on the real competitive forces between Oracle and Salesforce.

I was recently taken to task in the twittersphere (I post as @reichmanIT) by @Knieriemen, a VP at virtualization and storage reseller Chi Corporation and the host of the Infosmack podcast.  Mr. Knieriemen took exception to statements about storage single sourcing I made to the press related to a recent document about storage choices for virtual server environments, including the following:

RT @markwojtasiak: Forrester says "single source when possible" <-what an incredibly dumb thing for @reichmanIT to say

He followed up his comments with the following clarifications:

@reichmanIT In context to managing data center costs, single sourcing is probably the worst suggestion I've heard from an analyst

And

@reichmanIT In a virtual server environment, storage is a commodity and should be purchased as such to control costs

I don’t know Mr. Knieriemen personally, and I must admit that I was taken aback by his blunt approach, but I’m from New York and have a thick skin, so I can look past that. The reason I bring this up on Forrester’s blog is solely to take a look at the actual points of view brought out in the exchange. The crux of the argument is whether or not storage is commoditized, and in my opinion, it’s not (yet anyway). There are three reasons why:

This week saw one of the last remaining independent storage vendors (Compellent) get swallowed by one of the IT infrastructure mega-vendors (Dell) in an ongoing drive for comprehensive solution sets.  We’ve seen a great deal of industry consolidation in storage, as vendors want to offer broad solution sets to buyers that want a single throat to choke, more financial stability than little guys can offer, and better integration of solutions. 

In the best of breed world, standing up an application environment generally meant figuring out how to make products from 5 to 10 different vendors work together; doing integration testing on the customer's floor as if such a solution had never been attempted before.  The integrated mega-vendor approach aims to smooth out the connections between server, storage, OS, virtualization, SAN, LAN, NIC, HBA, facilities, and the process and professional services aspects that go into a successful IT environment.  In the end, all this integration by pure infrastructure players may not be able to compete with the application vendors who are increasingly moving towards proprietary hardware stacks built around their apps (Oracle/Sun) or advanced control of infrastructure solutions from partners that are designed to closely integrate with the apps (VMware, Microsoft).  In the end, the app vendors have a theoretical advantage as they own the stickiest piece of the IT puzzle and therefore have closer access to the context of application data that can be used to make decisions about tiering, archiving and data classifications that infrastructure vendors of all stripes have struggled with.  In practice though, the infrastructure vendors have a huge lead in terms of user relationships for hardware purchasing, and more mature capabilities for performance, data protection and integrated management tools.

In a recent blog post I wrote as a summary of the goings-on from Oracle OpenWorld this year, I said, "Oracle needs to enable consolidation of multiple applications on Exadata instances to make it more useful." Since that post, Oracle has contacted me stating that they, in fact, do currently enable consolidation of multiple applications within a single Exadata instance. According to Oracle:

"Based on what I am hearing from production customers, I believe that most or more likely all OLTP customers are running more than one application on an Exadata Database Machine in order to get better system utilization. Even the smaller quarter rack is simply too powerful for a single application. XXXX, XXXX, XXXX XXXX, and XXXX are examples of customers having multiple applications on a single Exadata Database Machine. This InformationWeek article, "Oracle Exadata V2 Customer Tells All," discusses how BNP moved 35 applications to an Exadata half rack.

 Note that Exadata is based on proven Oracle RAC technology, which has been used to consolidate multiple applications to a single RAC cluster since 2001. 

We also have customers that are running DW and OLTP on the same Database Machine, including: 

XXXX XXXX – runs DW and OLTP on the same Database Machine “Deployed Oracle Exadata Half Rack to improve data warehousing and online transaction processing, which is essential to factoring interest rates and processing loans.”

It’s been a few weeks since the extravaganza that was Oracle Open World 2010, and I wanted to post a few words about what I came away thinking.  Aside from the genuine America's Cup guarded by large men with earphones and white gloves, BMX stunts on closed San Francisco streets, Oktoberfest and the Black Eyed Peas, Don Henley and The Steve Miller Band, I’d have to call the event, well, slightly understated. Admittedly, I don’t know much about the world of middleware, so the big ticket product launch of Exalogic was largely lost on me, although it may well be a huge deal to those in the know. There was drama with Mark Hurd’s appearance after his recent hiring; Larry’s never been one to avoid stepping on toes so he was willing to antagonize a huge partner that shared the stage on his keynote. This Oracle/HP friction is an unavoidable reality of the era of co-opetition as Oracle transitions from being a software company that partners with hardware companies to becoming a one stop shop and a competitor to those partners. In fact it’s pretty similar to the dissing of NetApp, EMC and HDS that Larry doled out last year when he announced Exadata, but HP looked better in that round as they were the hardware partner before the Sun acquisition. Did you think Larry was going to become a hardware vendor without burning (or at least heating up) some bridges with partners?

Look past the hoopla and what struck me was the laser focus that Oracle is showing as they transform themselves into a true IT mega-vendor with the world’s leading database at its core. Here are some of the most striking elements of this as I see it: