Another Shot across the Bow of the Oracle Tanker
February 5, 2010
Oracle, in my opinion, is similar to those giant oil tankers that one can see in ports around the world. Some—like the vessels parked off the west coast of England—are just waiting for an economic uptick. Others dribble oil as they grind thousands of miles from one place to another. Every once in a while, one of these oil tankers dumps its cargo and makes headlines.
Oracle is an oil tanker in the enterprise software world. The company’s core technology is expensive to scale, mostly in my view because it, like DB2, was designed and built after the Korean War. Once the Oracle tanker leaves Sea World Parkway, it is tough to stop and almost as difficult to turn around quickly.
Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Oil_tanker_Omala_in_Rotterdam.jpg
There are some positives to the Oracle solution. Clueless investors like to hear “Oracle is our database engine” without understanding the implications of that phrase. I suppose the investors could ask the Salesforce.com engineers or the Amazon.com engineers who babysit the Oracle tanker at the core of their organization, but most just resonate with the brand name. And if the licensee has the human and financial resources, Oracle can scale. Presumably Oracle’s owning Sun Microsystems will help with the one-stop scaling shop, no non-Oracle hardware required going forward. And for any given problem, Oracle has a solution. Middleware. No problem. Search. No problem. XML capability like Mark Logic’s no less. No problem. Applications. No problem. ERP. No problem. Consulting. No problem. Google Search Appliance. No problem.
The downsides are easy to summarize. You need an Oracle DBA or multiple Oracle DBAs to keep the tanker shipshape. You need money. You need consulting support from Oracle. Getting help off the reservation can lead to some tense meetings with the Sea World crowd. Once in a while the “no problem” becomes a problem, and I will leave it to your own business savvy to figure out the implications of an errant Oracle service.
When I read “Netezza Teams Up with NEC to Battle Oracle”, three thoughts crossed my addled goose brain:
- Oracle is getting some competition from an unexpected pair, NEC and Netezza. Will HP, Dell, and Cisco find data management partners too? I think this will be fun to watch.
- What will IBM do? IBM’s PR department has been working overtime on the mainframe renaissance which seems to be of minor luminescence. IBM cannot sit on its hands and allow NEC and Netezza to go after Oracle and probably DB2. Six of one, half dozen of the other.
- Will the Google roll out its enterprise data management service, which of course does not exist, cannot possibly be a service, and has absolutely no traction within the Google management team?
Bottomline: Life is going to force Oracle to become even more aggressive. I am glad I am in Harrod’s Creek and not involved in procuring oil tanker software any longer.
Stephen E Arnold, February 5, 2010
No one paid me to write about software in sea faring terms. I will report this sad fact to MARAD.
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