BUSINESS
Oracle OpenWorld roundup
24-09-2010
by Dermot Corrigan
Oracle wants to become the Apple of the business technology world, according to CEO Larry Ellison.
Speaking at Oracle's OpenWorld 2010 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Ellison said the company had followed Apple's lead in developing stand-alone systems integrating both hardware and software.
"Steve Jobs is my best friend, and I watch what Apple do very closely," said Ellison. "If you engineer the hardware and software pieces to work together you get a better overall system which is more reliable, more secure, faster and easier to install and use."
Oracle's Exalogic Elastic Cloud product announced at OpenWorld 2010 is an example of this approach, as is its upgraded Exadata Database Machine product showcased this week.
Oracle's evolving Fusion Applications suite is being optimised for use on these stand-alone systems, Ellison said. Fusion contains over 100 distinct apps -- including new CRM, ERP and HCM offerings -- which will be fully available in early 2011.
Oracle also used OpenWorld to reveal Sun's latest SPARC T3 servers and ZFS storage devices. Advances in Solaris 11, MySQL, Java and Oracle Linux were also detailed.
Over 41,000 delegates from 116 countries attended the week-long event. Keynote speakers included Dell's Michael Dell, Intel's Thomas Kilroy, HP's Ann Livermore, Fujitsu's Noriyuki Toyoki and Infosys's Kris Gopalakrishnan. Irish companies speaking and exhibiting included Advanced Innovations and iQuate, which announced it was to create 25 new jobs on Friday.
During the event delegates learned how Oracle technology helped the winning team in this year's Americas Cup boat race, and powered the forthcoming Iron Man 2 film.
For more information on the event visit www.oracle.com/us/openworld/
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