August 7th, 2008
Oracle seeks unbreakable contract
Oracle’s position as the largest vendor at LinuxWorld illustrated an important point.
Linux is not just about sharing or open source. It can be about proprietary advantage.
In an interview with Oracle executives that advantage became clear. Oracle wants to run its clients’ entire stack. It wants to be one throat to choke. It wants an unbreakable contract.
Oracle’s announcements concentrated on the large enterprises that have become its specialty:
- VM Templates allowing more rapid deployment of enterprise applications.
- Enhanced support from partners for its Unbreakable Linux.
“Oracle’s goal is to assure that Linux continues to advance as a a leading choice in data centers,” said Monica Kumar, senior director for Linux product marketing. “Everything we do is helping users deploy Linux solutions faster and cheaper.”
Wim Coekaerts, vice president of Linux Engineering, explained “Linux has the same quality as a traditional Unix environment, on low cost hardware.”
On his blog, however, Coekaerts emphasized the word Oracle rather than any particular technology. “This gives us a very nice top to bottom product layer,” he wrote.
Oracle is also ready for its clients’ next step, the move toward cloud computing, he said.
“Oracle on Demand is our hosted service. That’s a good business. We use a lot of Linux in there. We use Oracle VM in there, which makes it easy to provision and consolidate systems. We can scale it how we want to scale it. “
This may sound boring. I don’t get as many talkbacks when I talk about an enterprise vendor’s success with enterprise customers as when I get snarky about Microsoft, or even Google.
But this is where the money is. Oracle knows where the money is. If the money is in Linux, Oracle is there. The snarkiest thing to be said about that is ka-ching.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
