A Day out at Oracle

I'm on a weeks tour in San Francisco and Silicon Valley as part of WebMission 08. As part of this I'm spending today at the Oracle Campus.

Many interesting speakers today, and this post will hopefully reflect what I hear. Quotes are NOT verbatim, but rather show the intent of the speakers words. Expect a sprawling post.

First up is Ken Jacobs from Oracle, VP Product Strategy, been part of Oracle for 27 years, when there were only 18 people in the company, and has seen the company grow to 80,000! In 1977 it was a consulting company, and then, to become their own bosses, they decided to build a relationship database. The Oracle DB was originally based on a product developed by/for the CIA - I didn't know that! At the time a SQL based relational database was a huge innovation. They moved the code from assembler to C - for Compatability, Portability, Connectability. Then in the late '80s started building client/server applications; HR, ledger etc.

"Timing is important - don't release what the market isn't ready for."

"Oracle's acquisition strategy is to keep up, and lead as the market consolidates."

Ken is now leading an Open Source database initiative inside Oracle. Gosh! He led the purchase of InnoDB, and it is based on that. The technology is included in MySQL among many others. They also own SleepyCat/BerkeleyDB for embedded databases, and are members of the Eclipse Foundation, and recently donated IP to the Apache Foundation.

Next up is Paul Pedrazzi, who came into Oracle from Peoplesoft, and now leads on Web 2.0 innovation in the company, in a four/five man group called the AppsLab. He talks about Enterprise 2.0. First thing he built was an "Ideas" site, where anyone can contribute and tag ideas. Tags can be created by the users and are not prescribed - rather guided with autocomplete to avoid duplication. Tags then can be monitored with RSS feeds. The Ideas site is now folded into Oracle Connect, their internal social network site. One of the interesting features here is Kudos - where folk can praise an individual, useful for Performance Mgmt. It is tied into their enterprise system, so the activity feed shows when folk change jobs, or move offices etc. He's building in file & bookmarking tagging and recommendation.

Joined by Vince Casarez, VP product strategy in Web Center. Vince takes experimental and research projects and productises. He's building Enteprise 2.0 Web 2.0 apps. Looks a bit like every other portlet type app on the planet, with enterprise hooks; not surprising as it's based on Java Server Faces. The CSS looks like it's lifted from Sharepoint!

Overall on the Oracle demos, interesting that they show things that are at least in part in direct competition to some of the start up companies here as part of WebMission, rather than showing how Oracle products are relevant to them and can help them grow. Maybe they just wanted to show that they are Web 2.0 Cool. But I don't grok how it really matters to this audience, today.

 

Next - Mike Butcher from TechCrunch UK introduced a panel discussion with Mike Murphy, Sales from Facebook, Liz O'Donnell from LinkedIn and Mike Culver from Amazon Web Services.

Mike Murphy. "Sticking banners all over the site is not the answer. Also avoid disguising advertising as content. Ask the users what they want". "We care passionately about how application developers are incentivised". "Advertising on canvas pages is a hodge podge at the moment - consistency is being worked on". "There will never be a toll booth in front of developers". "Keep the users, marketers and application developers first, and we'll (facebook) be alright". For developers - "Deliver utility, make it worth the profile real estate, throwing sheep doesn't cut it. Most important; make it easy to share your app". "Mark Zuckerburg is a visionary, and has no idea about Ad Sales. Let's me do my job"

Mike Culver. "The world is about ideas - this business is about ideas". Mentioned Animoto and growth from 50 instances to 3500 instances in three days. There are now 2 folk - not developers - from AWS working out of London, to cover Europe. "Jeff Bezos focus is purely on the customer; he'll do whatever he can to cut costs. My desk is a door turned on it's side with legs screwed on" Wow.

Liz O'Donnell."You spend the same time building a small business as a large business" Not sure I agree with that; in tech terms maybe, but marketing? "If you're the first in a social, viral app, you have to be an early adopter, or there's no reason to be there". "The criteria for local offices - avoid focusing on monetisation too soon, but when you do, sales must be done locally". "We're part of OpenSocial, but will be controlling the apps available in LinkedIn". "Early on as the company grew Reid Hoffman found a CEO - he didn't want to manage"

Mike Butcher - should the 20 startups establish a Valley presence? All three said "Yes".

 

Next up - Vishal Bhagwati from Oracle talking about how they do Mergers & Acquisitions. States that for a start up IPO is not really an option at the moment with the state of the economy.

• Provide complete solutions
• Move beyond ERP to complete business solutions
• Remain extensible, increase security
• Have a common technology platform based on open standards

Oracle has been the largest and biggest software acquirer for 5 years. There needs to be a strategic fit, a sales fit (customers in common), an integration fit (must integrate in around 6 months, mostly around back office rather than product) and a financial fit.

 

I'll post more about Webmission in due course.