Although I usually let personal attacks slip by, I couldn't let this post from Cameron Purdy remain unanswered, because it's kind of shameless. And BTW, sorry it took me some time, but like Cameron, I too am friggin' busy with real important stuff :-)
So I'll start with Cameron's ominous threat -- in answer to my question Where is Oracle? he said: "We are in your customer accounts. Every single one of them." I don't know if Cameron is naive enough to believe this (doubt it), is just trying to sound threatening (shaking in my boots) or is just spreading what he thinks is FUD, but obviously the threat is not very credible.
We all know that Oracle is a mean-ol' sales machine (throwing in Coherence for free to close an ELA on other products is pretty aggressive). Nothing new there. But fortunately, the world is bigger than Oracle, and not only does it have competitors, but there are many companies out there who wouldn't let an Oracle sales person set foot. And we will be in every single one of them...
Interesting thing is that the Oracle announcement of the Tangosol acquisition actually helped us close faster a few competitive deals in so-called Oracle-shops, because customers said (and I quote one directly): "I don't want to put all my eggs in one basket." I just came back from a GigaSpaces off-site management meeting, and the sales execs could only come up with one case where we actually lost a deal because of the Oracle acquisition (and that was due to the aforementioned aggressive tactics).
Anyway, enough with the petty bickering (I'll get back to petty bickering later). I was making a bigger point: Oracle is not pursuing an innovation strategy, and is therefore losing its relevance for new applications.
In Where is Oracle? I quoted Nick Carr's analysis of Oracle's strategy, which ended with: "Through acquisitions and share gains, [Oracle] will milk the old model until the old model goes dry." Following the whole BEA situation, here's a perspective from Rob Hailstone of the Butler Group (via Java Developer's Journal):
Some 15 or more years ago I was in the audience at an IT conference, listening to Larry Ellison describing CA as a ‘bottom-feeder’.
Since I was working for CA at the time this rankled a bit, but it was certainly true that CA had evolved a good business model that included acquiring end-of-life software companies where there was a substantial user base in need of ongoing support.
The last few years has seen Oracle adopt a variation on this bottom-feeder business model – it doesn’t wait for the victim to be near the end, but puts the knife in at the first sign of weakness.
Well, I guess you can call that innovation.
Besides Oracle's own strategy, I don't think that anyone can be taken serious claiming that all's well for Big-Ass commercial databases in a Web 2.0, scale-out world. I phrased my statement pretty carefully: "They overwhelmingly use MySQL and in many case use some other tier - such as their own file system or an in-memory cache, as the system of record for session or transaction state."
I'm sure that somewhere in the bowels of the organization of eBay, Amazon and Google there is an Oracle database or two installed, but that's not the point.
Now, back to the petty bickering. I don't get why Cameron keeps saying that we use Coherence for our web site. Oh, now I get it. I guess because our Wiki uses Atlassian Confluence and Coherence is used as a cache for Massive Confluence, he concluded that GigaSpaces uses Coherence. Clever boy! But seriously, not only do we not use Massive Confluence, by that token, every time Cameron trades on the NYSE he uses GigaSpaces.
Oh, I guess he's just using the famous Geva Perry tactic of "it's OK to make up anything and post it on my blog". I like it. Aggressive, Oracle-style.
