OracleWorld 2007 Larry Ellison Keynote
Larry Ellison talked about the progress of Oracle's Linux program which just started one year ago. Oracle has collected many big name customers, including Cnet, and Abercrombie & Fitch. They have kept Red Hat compatibility. VM and grid computing will be quite complementary.
Today, Oracle announced a different approach with the introduction the Oracle VM. Oracle VM has a single management console, open source, runs on Linux and Windows, and on 32 and 62 bit hardware. One feature that has been pushed is the live migration, i.e. you can keep your application running while migrating it. All current Oracle products are certified to run on Oracle VM. Support will cost $1000 for four cpus. This puts their price point below VMware's prices.
Fusion Applications was the biggest announcement of the keynote. Fusion applications are built on standard compliant middleware with a service orientated architecture. These applications will feature business intelligence functions, and can be delivered with built in self service administrative tools. These fusion apps will be delivered in the first half of 2008.
Oracle stated that the top three customers requests for fusion applications were: they must co-exist with the customer's current applications, show measurable business benefits, and provide software as a service.
The first fusions applications will be compatible with the business suite and will integrate with existing ERP and CRM systems. The first three fusion applications will be Sales Prospector, Sales References, and Sales Tools. In addition to current Salesforce tools that generate reports and help with upcoming sales predictions, these new fusion applications will add data mining the customer database. The plan is for sales teams to be able to look at what types of customers have made key purchases and then go and sell the same products/services to customers in the same industry. Sales teams will be able to share documents and successful pitches within a social networking site. It will be interesting to see how Salesforce.com responds to these developments.
The next most probable Fusion applications will be geared towards the insurance industry and will support both Oracle databases and DB2 databases. Oracle is working with IBM to achieve the DB2 compatibility.