Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison opened Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco on Sunday. As expected, the focus was heavily on cloud computing; Ellison outlined a number of new products and enhanced capabilities for existing Oracle products in the cloud.
"We are in the middle of a generational shift in computing," declared Ellison. "It is no less important than the shift to client-server from mainframe computing."
Cloud computing, once dismissed as a fad by Ellison a few years ago, now completely dominates the OpenWorld agenda and indeed Oracle's ongoing strategy.
"Nearly all our competitors are new," Ellison added, pointing to the likes of Salesforce.com and Workday as primary threats in the cloud, in the place of IBM and SAP. Of Oracle's traditional competition, only Microsoft has managed to transition to a full-stack cloud competitor with IaaS, PaaS and SaaS offerings, he pointed out.
New products, all cloud
OpenWorld will see a slew of 45 new Oracle products and features, all heavily slanted towards cloud computing, Ellison promised.
His keynote touched on new features unveiled for Oracle database 12.2, including greatly expanded multi-tenant capability for over 4 000 simultaneous instances and live migration of running applications into and out of the cloud.
New applications on show will include solutions for manufacturing and e-commerce, Ellison said, as well as cloud service versions of existing products, including the company's Exadata platform and RAC (Real Application Clusters) technology.
'No on-switch for security'
The Oracle chairman also called for an industry-wide overhaul in data security in light of ongoing news of data breaches.
"People buy security features for Oracle and then don't turn them on. There should be no on-switch for security. Everything should be encrypted, all the time. We have to have dramatic improvements in security - it's becoming a bigger risk as we move to the cloud."
Ellison shared the stage with Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, who spoke at length of Oracle/Intel's joint research into platform optimisation, including the companies' Project Apollo. The high-scale data centre achieved 50% performance improvements with existing Intel architecture and Oracle software after a month of tuning and optimisation by engineers from both firms.
The optimisations will be shared with the industry in the form of published blueprints, Krzanich said.
OpenWorld 2015
Oracle's flagship annual conference is expected to host over 60 000 delegates from 140 countries, with 3 000 speakers across a total of 25 separate simultaneous conferences. Follow the event online at #OOW15.
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