Contrary to mainstream media attention, the multiple possibilities of how consumer IoT will transform our everyday lives aren’t the only angle of this headline-gaining trend. There’s a huge opportunity for “industrial IoT” and “Smart Cities” to impact the world in the same capacity – especially during critical situations. For example, a community water dam that needs to release water can leverage embedded critical communications logic to alert the appropriate individuals, on the right device, as...| By Maureen O'Gara | Article Rating: |
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| September 25, 2009 11:00 AM EDT | Reads: |
26,335 |
Well, well, well, a little bird points to IBM as gumming up the works with the European Commission so Oracle and Sun can’t close their deal.
Oracle of course picked up Sun after IBM’s negotiations with Sun failed and Oracle made IBM the intended target of the proposed acquisition in an ad on the front page of the Wall Street Journal last week so the idea that IBM is whispering in the EC’s ear makes perfect sense.
And IBM has plenty of practice using the European Commission to attack its enemies. Just ask Microsoft.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison claims the European Commission’s prolonged investigation of Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun, which isn’t expected to finish much before the agency’s mid-January deadline, is costing Sun $100 million a month in revenues and a weakened revenue stream will impact how many employees Sun gets to keep if and when the acquisition is approved.
Ellison, who was interviewed on-stage after a Churchill Club dinner Monday evening by former Sun president and COO Ed Zander of all people, told the crowd, “The longer this takes, the more money Sun is going to lose, and that’s not good for anybody. We want to get this done to save as many jobs as possible.”
Sun’s fretful accounts either just aren’t buying because of the uncertainty of Sun’s fate and continued investment in its product lines or are being run off by IBM and HP. Ditto a lot of its resellers anxious over their revenue streams.
And to meet Oracle’s goal of wringing $1.5 billion in operating income out of Sun the first year after the merger closes, ace Wall Street analyst Toni Sacconaghi now estimates that Oracle will have to fire half of Sun’s people, 15,000 souls.
Ellison said he thinks the EC is going to approve the merger just like the Justice Department did in August without any strings attached.
He said he means to keep all of Sun and won’t sell off any of it, as has been widely supposed he would.
“We are keeping everything,” he said. “We’re keeping tape. We’re keeping storage. We’re keeping x86 and Sparc. And we’re going to increase investment in all of them.”
That means keeping rival open source database MySQL, whose future the EC claims to be so worried about and, it’s been conjectured, may force Oracle to spin it off. Ellison doesn’t think so. Oracle and MySQL serve different purposes, he said, and “do not compete at all.”
“We’re not going to spin it off,” he said, claiming the EC is going to decide the Sun merger is a wholly pro-competitive deal.
The reason he wants Sun and all its satellites is to turn Oracle into the new IBM like Byzantium was the new Rome.
Not the IBM of Lou Gerstner or Sam Palmisano, he said, but the IBM of TJ Watson, “when IBM really was the dominant software company” and its “hardware and software was running most of the enterprises on the planet.”
In Ellison’s opinion, “TJ Watson’s IBM was the greatest company in the history of enterprise in America” and “We think with the combination of Sun technology and Oracle technology we can succeed and beat IBM. That’s our goal. We have a deep interest in the systems business. We think that by combining our software with hardware that we can deliver systems that can be the backbone of most enterprises in America and around the world.”
Oracle, which reportedly doesn’t see Microsoft as a competitor any more, is currently working on a five-year plan to realize Ellison’s dream and Ellison, 65, told Zander he intends to stick around to see it happen.
Cloud computing, a faddish term thought up by “some nitwits on Sand Hill Road,” apparently won’t feature much in the plan. According to Ellison, the cloud’s “not water vapor. It’s databases and operating system and memory and microprocessors and the Internet!”
“All it is is a computer attached to a network.”
“My objection to cloud computing is the fact that cloud computing is not only the future of computing, it is the present and the entire past….What do you think Google runs on?”
Oracle’s not interested in Sun’s hardware per se but its hardware as the basis for end-to-end systems integrated “at the engineering level” with Oracle’s software. Ellison wants to peddle airline reservation systems and banking systems.
Larry’s quest for world domination will presumably be impeded by what he sees as slow economic recovery. The consumer is tapped out and up to his neck in debt, Ellison said, creating an “L-shaped” non-recovery for the next five years and involving some “fundamental changes.”
Published September 25, 2009 Reads 26,335
Copyright © 2009 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.
- EC Costing Sun $100M a Month: Ellison
- Oracle-Sun: Gartner Suspects EC of Ulterior Motives
- EC Holds Up Oracle-Sun Merger
- EC May Not Clear Oracle-Sun Merger: Reuters
- Oracle’s Secret Plan for Sun
- Oracle + Sun Will Be Like the iPhone: Larry Ellison
- Oracle-Sun: Jonathan Schwartz Writes His Toughest Ever Email
- It's the End of Sun, Only Oracle Survives: Charles Fitzgerald
- Oracle Snaps Up Sun, Gains Control of Java
More Stories By Maureen O'Gara
Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025. Twitter: @MaureenOGara
Contrary to mainstream media attention, the multiple possibilities of how consumer IoT will transform our everyday lives aren’t the only angle of this headline-gaining trend. There’s a huge opportunity for “industrial IoT” and “Smart Cities” to impact the world in the same capacity – especially during critical situations. For example, a community water dam that needs to release water can leverage embedded critical communications logic to alert the appropriate individuals, on the right device, as...Jan. 23, 2016 02:00 AM EST Reads: 829 |
By Elizabeth White The Internet of Things (IoT), in all its myriad manifestations, has great potential. Much of that potential comes from the evolving data management and analytic (DMA) technologies and processes that allow us to gain insight from all of the IoT data that can be generated and gathered. This potential may never be met as those data sets are tied to specific industry verticals and single markets, with no clear way to use IoT data and sensor analytics to fulfill the hype being given the IoT today. Jan. 23, 2016 02:00 AM EST Reads: 936 |
By Liz McMillan The Internet of Things has the potential to disrupt all industries, not just consumer, as businesses leverage the new insights and capabilities enabled by new devices / things, automation, integration and analytics, etc., to transform how they do business.
One industry ripe for disruption is higher education. Colleges and universities are being challenged with serving more students and at the same time ensuring successful student outcomes.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Chris Witeck, Principa...Jan. 23, 2016 01:15 AM EST Reads: 727 |
By Pat Romanski The IoT's basic concept of collecting data from as many sources possible to drive better decision making, create process innovation and realize additional revenue has been in use at large enterprises with deep pockets for decades. So what has changed?
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Prasanna Sivaramakrishnan, Solutions Architect at Red Hat, discussed the impact commodity hardware, ubiquitous connectivity, and innovations in open source software are having on the connected universe of people, thi...Jan. 22, 2016 10:45 PM EST Reads: 424 |
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You might have played with the technology a couple of years ago, only to find the extra infrastructure requirements were painful to implement and poorly documented. This probably left a bitter taste in your mouth, especially when things went wrong.Jan. 22, 2016 10:30 PM EST Reads: 461 |
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As a first step, manufacturers must embrace a new product development ecosystem in order to support these products. Jan. 22, 2016 09:15 PM EST Reads: 453 |
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By Elizabeth White When it comes to IoT in the enterprise, namely the commercial building and hospitality markets, a benefit not getting the attention it deserves is energy efficiency, and IoT’s direct impact on a cleaner, greener environment when installed in smart buildings. Until now clean technology was offered piecemeal and led with point solutions that require significant systems integration to orchestrate and deploy. There didn't exist a 'top down' approach that can manage and monitor the way a Smart Buildi...Jan. 22, 2016 05:45 PM EST Reads: 869 |
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By Elizabeth White SYS-CON Events announced today that Fusion, a leading provider of cloud services, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Fusion, a leading provider of integrated cloud solutions to small, medium and large businesses, is the industry's single source for the cloud. Fusion's advanced, proprietary cloud service platform enables the integration of leading edge solutions in the cloud, including clou...Jan. 22, 2016 01:45 PM EST Reads: 356 |
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By Elizabeth White The Internet of Things is in the early stages of mainstream deployment but it promises to unlock value and rapidly transform how organizations manage, operationalize, and monetize their assets. IoT is a complex structure of hardware, sensors, applications, analytics and devices that need to be able to communicate geographically and across all functions. Once the data is collected from numerous endpoints, the challenge then becomes converting it into actionable insight.Jan. 22, 2016 01:00 PM EST Reads: 560 |
By Elizabeth White Contextual Analytics of various threat data provides a deeper understanding of a given threat and enables identification of unknown threat vectors.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, David Dufour, Head of Security Architecture, IoT, Webroot, Inc., discussed how through the use of Big Data analytics and deep data correlation across different threat types, it is possible to gain a better understanding of where, how and to what level of danger a malicious actor poses to an organization, and to determ...Jan. 22, 2016 12:45 PM EST Reads: 922 |
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By Carmen Gonzalez NHK, Japan Broadcasting, will feature the upcoming @ThingsExpo Silicon Valley in a special 'Internet of Things' and smart technology documentary that will be filmed on the expo floor between November 3 to 5, 2015, in Santa Clara. NHK is the sole public TV network in Japan equivalent to the BBC in the UK and the largest in Asia with many award-winning science and technology programs. Japanese TV is producing a documentary about IoT and Smart technology and will be covering @ThingsExpo Silicon Val...Jan. 22, 2016 12:00 PM EST Reads: 562 |
By Elizabeth White As the Internet of Things becomes more capable, moving from an initial ad hoc bundle of chaos to an optimized set of interconnected assets, we will need to ensure it performs and is reliable.
But this means the tools measuring the performance and reliability of the IoT will also need to mature as the need for timely, understandable, quality, business-critical information becomes paramount. Sensors that are malfunctioning, devices that are offline, data that’s little more than noise can all scut...Jan. 22, 2016 11:15 AM EST Reads: 441 |
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The Internet of Things (IoT), in all its myriad manifestations, has great potential. Much of that potential comes from the evolving data management and analytic (DMA) technologies and processes that allow us to gain insight from all of the IoT data that can be generated and gathered. This potential may never be met as those data sets are tied to specific industry verticals and single markets, with no clear way to use IoT data and sensor analytics to fulfill the hype being given the IoT today.
The Internet of Things has the potential to disrupt all industries, not just consumer, as businesses leverage the new insights and capabilities enabled by new devices / things, automation, integration and analytics, etc., to transform how they do business.
One industry ripe for disruption is higher education. Colleges and universities are being challenged with serving more students and at the same time ensuring successful student outcomes.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Chris Witeck, Principa...
The IoT's basic concept of collecting data from as many sources possible to drive better decision making, create process innovation and realize additional revenue has been in use at large enterprises with deep pockets for decades. So what has changed?
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Prasanna Sivaramakrishnan, Solutions Architect at Red Hat, discussed the impact commodity hardware, ubiquitous connectivity, and innovations in open source software are having on the connected universe of people, thi...
WebRTC has had a real tough three or four years, and so have those working with it. Only a few short years ago, the development world were excited about WebRTC and proclaiming how awesome it was.
You might have played with the technology a couple of years ago, only to find the extra infrastructure requirements were painful to implement and poorly documented. This probably left a bitter taste in your mouth, especially when things went wrong.
For manufacturers, the Internet of Things (IoT) represents a jumping-off point for innovation, jobs, and revenue creation. But to adequately seize the opportunity, manufacturers must design devices that are interconnected, can continually sense their environment and process huge amounts of data.
As a first step, manufacturers must embrace a new product development ecosystem in order to support these products.
When it comes to IoT in the enterprise, namely the commercial building and hospitality markets, a benefit not getting the attention it deserves is energy efficiency, and IoT’s direct impact on a cleaner, greener environment when installed in smart buildings. Until now clean technology was offered piecemeal and led with point solutions that require significant systems integration to orchestrate and deploy. There didn't exist a 'top down' approach that can manage and monitor the way a Smart Buildi...
SYS-CON Events announced today that Fusion, a leading provider of cloud services, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Fusion, a leading provider of integrated cloud solutions to small, medium and large businesses, is the industry's single source for the cloud. Fusion's advanced, proprietary cloud service platform enables the integration of leading edge solutions in the cloud, including clou...
SYS-CON Events announced today that Interface Masters Technologies, a leading vendor in the network monitoring and high speed networking markets, will exhibit at the 18th International CloudExpo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and the 19th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
The Internet of Things is in the early stages of mainstream deployment but it promises to unlock value and rapidly transform how organizations manage, operationalize, and monetize their assets. IoT is a complex structure of hardware, sensors, applications, analytics and devices that need to be able to communicate geographically and across all functions. Once the data is collected from numerous endpoints, the challenge then becomes converting it into actionable insight.
Contextual Analytics of various threat data provides a deeper understanding of a given threat and enables identification of unknown threat vectors.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, David Dufour, Head of Security Architecture, IoT, Webroot, Inc., discussed how through the use of Big Data analytics and deep data correlation across different threat types, it is possible to gain a better understanding of where, how and to what level of danger a malicious actor poses to an organization, and to determ...
NHK, Japan Broadcasting, will feature the upcoming @ThingsExpo Silicon Valley in a special 'Internet of Things' and smart technology documentary that will be filmed on the expo floor between November 3 to 5, 2015, in Santa Clara. NHK is the sole public TV network in Japan equivalent to the BBC in the UK and the largest in Asia with many award-winning science and technology programs. Japanese TV is producing a documentary about IoT and Smart technology and will be covering @ThingsExpo Silicon Val...
As the Internet of Things becomes more capable, moving from an initial ad hoc bundle of chaos to an optimized set of interconnected assets, we will need to ensure it performs and is reliable.
But this means the tools measuring the performance and reliability of the IoT will also need to mature as the need for timely, understandable, quality, business-critical information becomes paramount. Sensors that are malfunctioning, devices that are offline, data that’s little more than noise can all scut...
With the exponential growth of network traffic slowing down data transmission, companies are looking for solutions. Recently, a solution has emerged that can help improve your data speed with data centers on the edge. These micro data center solutions can simplify the lives of many data center owners and operators because they are self-contained, secure computing environments, assembled in a factory and shipped in one enclosure which includes all the necessary power, cooling, security, and manag...
Today on #c9d9 we talked about best practices for orchestrating enterprise software testing. Delivering software faster, but with lower quality, doesn’t help you win in the market.
What are some of the challenges and proven tips and patterns used to test critical software – across all the different supported platforms – quickly and efficiently?
The modern software development landscape consists of best practices and tools that allow teams to deliver software in a near-continuous manner. By adopting a culture of automation, measurement and sharing, the time to ship code has been greatly reduced, allowing for shorter release cycles and quicker feedback from customers and users. Still, with all of these tools and methods, how can teams stay on top of what is taking place across their infrastructure and codebase? Hopping between services a...
Welcome to the first top DevOps news roundup of 2016! At the end of last year, we saw some great predictions for 2016.
While we’re excited to kick off the new year, this week’s top posts reminded us to take a second to slow down and really understand the current state of affairs. For example, do you actually know what microservices are – or aren’t? What about DevOps? Does the emphasis still fall mostly on the development side? This week’s top news definitely got the wheels turning and just migh...
The battle over bimodal IT is heating up. Now that there’s a reasonably broad consensus that Gartner’s advice about bimodal IT is deeply flawed – consensus everywhere except perhaps at Gartner – various ideas are springing up to fill the void.
The bimodal problem, of course, is well understood. ‘Traditional’ or ‘slow’ IT uses hidebound, laborious processes that would only get in the way of ‘fast’ or ‘agile’ digital efforts. The result: incoherent IT strategies and shadow IT struggles that lead ...
If a slow or unresponsive application on your mobile device or PC has ever left you feeling angry, frustrated and unproductive, you're not alone. Business success in today's digital age relies on application performance. Yet according to the Riverbed Global Application Performance Survey 2015, nine out of 10 organizations suffer from poor performance on a regular basis. Executives say the poor performance of enterprise applications has negatively impacted their work on a regular basis. Consequen...
Rapid innovation, changing business landscapes, and new IT demands force businesses to make changes quickly. The DevOps approach is a way to increase business agility through collaboration, communication, and integration across different teams in the IT organization.
In his session at @DevOpsSummit, Chris Van Tuin, Chief Technologist for the Western US at Red Hat, discussed:
The acceleration of application delivery for the business with DevOps
For it to be SOA – let alone SOA done right – we need to pin down just what "SOA done wrong" might be. First-generation SOA with Web Services and ESBs, perhaps?
But then there's second-generation, REST-based SOA. More lightweight and cloud-friendly, but many REST-based SOA practices predate the microservices wave.
Today, microservices and containers go hand in hand – only the details of "container-oriented architecture" are largely on the drawing board – and are not likely to look much like S...
Docker Swarm is a cluster manager for Docker. When accessed via the Docker API by Docker API Clients or Docker command line tools, a Docker Swarm cluster looks just like a single Docker Host. Docker Swarm distributes containers to multiple nodes using various deployment strategies in the cluster scheduler.
Having in mind that a Swarm cluster looks like a single Docker Host from the API point of view, it should be very easy to monitor Docker Swarm with existing Docker monitoring tools! Conn...
In the Bimodal model we find two areas of IT - the traditional kind where the main concern is keeping the lights on and the IT focusing on agility and speed, where everything needs to be faster.
Today companies are investing in new technologies and processes to emulate their most agile competitors. Gone are the days of waterfall development and releases only every few months. Today's IT and the business it powers demands performance akin to a supercar - everything needs to be faster, every sc...
As smart cars, pre-loaded with millions of lines of code, are becoming the norm in the automotive industry, the topic of safety has come to the forefront of the conversation in a big way. Most consumers remember several large-scale recalls in the past few years, and it’s left some a bit wary of software glitches that could affect driver safety.
Test automation is arguably the most important innovation to the process of QA testing in software development. The ability to automate regression testing and other repetitive test cases can significantly reduce the overall production time for even the most complex solutions. As software continues to be developed for new platforms – including mobile devices and the diverse array of endpoints that will be created during the rise of the Internet of Things - automation integration will have a huge ...
DevOps will play a major role in 2016 simply because DevOps is all about savings which is fundamentally different from the traditionally IT budgeted projects; without DevOps the dollars are anyway drained for nothing because the teams are working in silos which leads to the delay due to inter dependency, poor code quality, too much of un-warranted hand overs, post deployment issues, inconsistent environment, non-availability of infra structural resources etc as per Forrester research 60% of appl...
Mobile testing is getting harder: more devices, multiple operating systems, higher quality expectations and shorter development cycles.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Tom Chavez, Senior Evangelist at SOASTA, discussed the seven steps to improving your mobile testing process.
Tom Chavez, with 20+ years of experience as a product manager in software development tools, works in product management at SOASTA, the leader in performance analytics. He has worked across the Silicon Valley at industr...
The founders of RedMonk unpack the often tricky path to DevOps and to explore how enterprises can find ways to make pan-IT collaboration a rule, not an exception.
Gentleman, let’s look at DevOps through a little bit of a different lens. Often, it’s thought of as a philosophy. It’s talked about as a way of improving speed and performance of applications and quality, but ultimately, this is a behavior and a culture discussion -- and the behavior and culture of developers is an important part of m...
At the heart of the Cloud Native recipe is the shift to a ‘containerized microservices’ application architecture.
This is a pretty fundamental shift in IT habits, embracing both the Docker-inspired container technology wave as well as a holistic transformation of how software is built too. So how do the two relate, what is the connection between employing containers for deployment and microservices for architecture?
Because of the explosive growth of DevOps, there is still a seemingly large amount of confusion on the topic. While I’ve written about this before [link to DevOps article], this article takes a shot at dividing things in a way that we naturally do as users, but vendors often fail to differentiate, simply because “DevOps” is a hot term, and it’s all too often about SEO and AdWords when vendors talk/write.
Although MIT makes the specific point that the Platform Business Model is exactly that, a business model not a technology, there is naturally a clear and powerful link with the Cloud model ‘PaaS’ – Platform as a Service.
This offers literally that, a Platform as a service, and so it can play a central component part in enabling the Platform Business Model.
DevOps has often been described in terms of CAMS: Culture, Automation, Measuring, Sharing. While we’ve seen a lot of focus on the “A” and even on the “M”, there are very few examples of why the “C" is equally important in the DevOps equation.
In her session at @DevOps Summit, Lori MacVittie, of F5 Networks, explored HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 along with Microservices to illustrate why a collaborative culture between Dev, Ops, and the Network is critical to ensuring success.






















