 Welcome to Newsdesk on SiliconANGLE TV for Thursday, September 27th, 2012. I'm Kristen Folletti. Oracle Open World 2012 kicks off September 30th and will be held through October 4th this year in San Francisco. The conference will attract tens of thousands of IT pros as well as hundreds of partners and will provide a very good perspective on where Oracle now stands in the market. We're now joined by SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier with news on what to expect at this year's conference. Welcome, John. Hey, Kristen. How are you? Good morning. Good morning. So you like to refer to Oracle Open World as Oracle Closed World, and you're not the only one to criticize them. EMC's David Nicholson is another. So this year, Oracle says they're beginning to bring back the Linux Pavilion by popular demand. Is this a return to a more open Oracle? Well, see, I mean, I'm not sure that'll be the case. I mean, Oracle loves to throw the marketing jargon out there, and so we really never have seen them as open. I mean, they have a closed proprietary approach, and they're essentially doing things in the market only to kind of keep their existing install base happy. However, they do also run Java One, which is a conference at the same time as Oracle Open World because they bought Sun. So with that, they bought Java. So they have a lot of interesting angles with Java and MySQL, some open source software. So it's interesting to see those communities kind of clashing together. So I'm not expecting Oracle to be massively open other than a gimmick, marketing gimmick at this point. Oracle founder Larry Ellison gave what we at SiliconANGLE dubbed the worst keynote ever. And this statement was also echoed by their sales force founder, Mark Benioff. What can we expect from Larry's keynote this year? Well, I actually love the keynote from him. I mean, worst in terms of maybe content and overall kind of cluelessness, but he is so entertaining on the keynote. It's just Larry Ellison is just awesome to watch. He's his own personality. He's a titan in the business. He goes back to old school. So what I'm expecting this year is similar flair from him. I'm expecting, essentially, I'm the senior big man still on campus. He's the longest reigning CEO and tech of these kinds of companies. He's been around the block so many times. And he also got the America's Cup going on. So I'm expecting to see a lot of flair tying into the work that's going on the America's Cup. Essentially, it's the Larry show. So I'm expecting, essentially, it's all about Larry, all about Larry's vision. And Larry essentially co-opting market trends and tying that to the install base of Oracle. Larry Ellison finally acknowledged that big data is a thing in his closing keynote last year. And he also made some other announcements about a shift in strategy with regard to the cloud. What role do you see big data playing in Oracle Open World this year? I think it's going to be one of the big high storylines for Oracle. I think you're going to see them really promote that heavily. They did last year with cloud and they got teased out a little bit of big data. And cloud era has a huge deal with Oracle. So they've been reselling cloud era's system and software. The issue with big data, in my opinion, is Oracle is really going to trump up the messaging. Mainly because Oracle is under attack by a lot of new big data concepts and technologies coming out of the open source community. And the Duke H-Base, look at MongoDB with coming called TenGen, just written up in the Wall Street Journal today as one of the hottest startups. Things like Squirrel, it's a startup that launches doing all this kind of XNSA stuff around databases. And also Google just put out some new papers around some new database technology. This is absolutely changing the game in the database market. We've been reporting about it at the cloud level with solid state drives. With cloud and these new storage technologies, it's absolutely a direct threat to Oracle's entire database business. And the world is moving in a direction away from what Oracle architecture is all about. So we're going to see how Oracle can defend that. So it's going to be fun to watch. Software defined infrastructure is definitely trending in enterprise, but it's also been something Oracle has been slightly hostile towards in terms of pricing. Do you see any changes on the horizon this year in that regard? No, I think Oracle is going to dismiss it and deflect and change the direction of the conversation. I mean, we just put out a video on SiliconANGLE TV with Pauline Nist and she says essentially with Xeon processors all over the place. Once was called commodity hardware is low cost, now industry standard hardware. People are doing more now with these kinds of multicore distributed systems all over the place in a very horizontal way. That's a direct threat to Oracle. Oracle wants to vertically integrate everything and that's going to be something that is a force that Oracle has to deal with. And they either going to have to co-opt it or run away from it. So I'm expecting that they'll probably message against that this year. And so look for Oracle to have a lot of hype around big data but they do not want to talk about these new database technologies and these open source communities that are developing really, really fast. In other Silicon Valley news, Marissa Mayer's Yahoo has been intensely scrutinized at the folks over at All Things D. By comparison, Amalik's editorial today seemed almost anemic. And in about 300 words or less, he said Yahoo is unsavable and rotten to the core. You've been following Yahoo since its inception. What's your take on that? Well, I love how the pundits who don't know anything about technology love to talk about that stuff. I have a lot of respect for Amalik and I think as a technology writer, he's been around the block, he sees this and I just love his headline rotten to the core as if it's an apple or something. So it's kind of a really interesting headline there. But ultimately I think a lot of these guys are using kind of anecdotal information they hear from either ex-employees or whatnot and I live in Palo Alto and you can't swing a dead cat about hitting an ex-Yahoo, an employee who could have saved the company. So there's a zillion different answers of what people think Yahoo should do. I personally think it's all BS at this point. Yahoo is absolutely savable. Amalik is wrong on this one. Although his perspective might be accurate with his sources but I absolutely think that Yahoo is not rotten to the core. I think that they are savable. This is a company that has 500 million unique users every day. And so they do have assets and they can pivot off that. So the problem with Yahoo in my opinion is they have no guts. And what they got to do is essentially just make a decision, go down the road and really build that product leadership. They do have people who can do it. The executive management has been lacking and that's been a big problem. So with Marissa Mayer, she can come in here and set that standard, bring people in who know what they're talking about and not have a second guessing situation, go in, pick a market, close the position, drive down a path and leverage those 500 million people every day. And to me that's an amazing turnaround opportunity. I personally would say no way has it rotten to the core. They have an absolutely great chance of turning it around. Something we've known at Silicon Angle for a while is that Enterprise is a hot venture from a capital perspective, from a venture capital perspective. And an editorial at the Wall Street Journal today seems to support our thesis. So is the end in sight when it comes to the press's obsession with consumer tech? Yeah, I think it's great. I mean, I think Enterprise is hot. It's totally hot right now. And things like big data and technology like Hadoop we've been covering. It's really been the beginning of that. And now the conversations are changing. We saw the Intel developer forum, which is really a bell weather around what's going to happen the next two years. Because Intel is always ahead of the curve. And really you're hearing this notion of solutions. And it's always been kind of like one of those things where, oh yeah, solutions selling, solution products. But really there is a market now for that. The enterprise really is becoming more consumer-like. And there's a lot of money to be made there. And certainly this business is everywhere. So that market is much more attractive and gettable for entrepreneurs. So what Sequoia Capital has been saying in particular is, hey, the enterprise deals are gettable. They're not usually the long sales cycle like it used to be with Cloud Mobile and Social. It's really a hot area. So the Wall Street Journal has really got a good story on this one. I think they're right on the money. And the hipster kind of consumer companies are just few and far between at this point. So yeah, a lot of activity going on. But at the end of the day, you're not going to see the next Instagram once a generation. So I think the hopes are moving to more realistic business value or user value type products. Well, John, we appreciate your analysis. And we'll see you soon. OK, thanks. And we'll be bringing you more information on Oracle Open World as it becomes available. 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