The main conference kick-off saw Oracle CEO Larry Ellison give his welcome to Oracle OpenWorld, and Boxfusion Consulting were there to hear Larry's view of the world!

The main conference kick-off saw Oracle CEO Larry Ellison give his welcome to Oracle OpenWorld, and Boxfusion Consulting were there to hear Larry's view of the world!

He quickly moved to outline his view of the Cloud as a new era of "Utility" Computing and the benefits the Cloud gave customers through the hiding of technical complexity and passing of capital costs to the Service Provider. But the key direction for the week was shaped with the four big announcements Larry made:

1. The Oracle Cloud will now offer IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) In response (and direct competition) to Amazon, Oracle is offering customers the chance to run custom and existing applications in the cloud.

2. Oracle will now make available the Oracle Private Cloud Oracle Private Cloud stemmed from customers (particularly banks) wanting to experience the benefits of Cloud while keeping their data on their own premises - something that Boxfusion Consulting have also heard first hand from customers. Larry made it clear that amongst others, Fusion Applications, EBS and Siebel CRM will run in the new Private Cloud, which is effectively Oracle infrastructure running virtualised compute and storage services within a customer's own datacentre. Customers do not pay for the infrastructure - rather they pay fees depending on use, just as in the Public Cloud - while Oracle manages and maintains it.

3. The next generation of the Oracle database - Oracle 12c ("c" is for Cloud!) This will be a true multi-tenant database and has been engineered to support specific challenges faced by typical SaaS, cloud-based, applications. A "container" database will hold many "pluggable" databases within it, meaning that many of a database’s core processes will only run in the container, reducing maintenance overheads and allowing multiple pluggable databases to exist separately - perfect for cloud-based applications supporting many different customers whose databases can all now be housed within these containers.

The advantage for an Oracle Fusion CRM customer running on the Oracle Public Cloud is that they will have their own individual database storing only their data - guaranteeing data security and ensuring critical aspects such as auditing work correctly - in contrast to competitor SaaS CRM applications that store data from many customers within one single database.

4. A new generation of the EXADATA systems - the EXADATA X3 This had some mind-blowing performance statistics attached to it, but the key link again was that the Oracle Cloud (Public and Private) will be powered by these engineered systems.

So it seems that the week ahead will generally focus on cloud computing and the way that Oracle is embracing it throughout its technology stack. Database sessions will highlight the way they have been engineered to support cloud deployments. Server and storage sessions will also show how they are being built to run the Oracle Cloud. And of course, Applications sessions will highlight the way they are being built to run in the cloud and integrate with other cloud based Applications.

Boxfusion Consulting are excited at the prospect of the further outlining of this strategy this week! And we have a particular focus on seeing this strategy mapping to our own core Applications skills in Siebel CRM, OBIEE and moving forward with Fusion Applications, so we can support our Customers' fast-changing needs. But first, before all these sessions can start, Oracle is hosting Partners and Customers at the Opening night Welcome party...