 want to do a recap of the day. That was Bob Bram, VP of Marketing at the Symmetrix Division. We've had a number of folks on from that organization, in particular, Brian Gallagher, who's a good friend and had been on theCUBE a number of times. And it's the flagship product of EMC, really, Symmetrix. I remember when it was first launched, my jaw dropped. A lot of people aren't as old as I am. That's why they don't remember this. But back in the late 80s, IBM had 90% of the storage business. It was unbelievable. They were just the dominant player. Anything IBM did, it took maybe competitors 15, 18 months to respond. So they dominated it. EMC essentially completely changed that game with Symmetrix. New platform, used smaller five and a quarter inch disks at the time to replace these big 9, 14 inch disks. More economical, used cash as a way to increase the performance. And it completely changed a lot of businesses, airlines, financial services. And then obviously we know the story. EMC now a $20 billion company and proud owner of VMware, one of the greatest acquisitions in the history of the computer industry. Quite amazing. That really is a form of disruption. Now EMC is in the position of really, they've got that install base. It's a legacy install base. But undoubtedly one that's driving a lot of maintenance revenue. And the company's putting a lot of effort into the architecture, into putting on new capabilities, like thin provisioning, which is popularized by the likes of companies like 3par, simplifying the clicks, the number of clicks that it takes to actually provision. So you're seeing EMC continue to make improvements to that platform, and it throws off a lot of cash. We're going to be taking a close look at this in the Wikibon community. Looking at tier one, right now there's really three so-called tier one class players. EMC with Symmetrics, IBM with the DS8000, and Hitachi with the VSP. And 3par is knocking on the door. With the T-Class and now the V-Class series, are very interesting products that are competing for that high-end market share. But EMC, I think unquestionably, is the leader there. And that space is starting to heat up again with virtualization and cloud. One of the things we didn't talk to Bob about was cloud service providers and what kind of traction it is getting inside of that space, a theme that we've talked about a lot at Silicon Angle and Wikibon. Now, earlier today, we heard from, I had recapped earlier, we heard from Tucci and Gelsinger from EMC and the keynote. They got a lot of good space this morning. And then we heard from Mark Herd and Thomas Curian, who was the VP of product development at Oracle. And he talked about Exadata and basically the secret sauce behind Exadata, what makes Exadata so great. And there are really four things that he talked about. The first was offloading disk storage functions, something that he called smart scanning. The second was fast connectivity, which is really the server to disk communications using Infiniband. He didn't mention Infiniband specifically, but that's what it does. And then heuristics to match data and device characteristics, so you can move the most frequently accessed data into high speed memory and cache and flash, and the slower low performance data onto spinning disk, which is very important because there's now so much data in the world, 1.2 zettabytes shipped last year, growing 44x by the end of the decade. There's so much data, it's virtually impossible for humans to manage that placement of data. Takes too long, humans aren't fast enough. We just can't deal with all that data, so you now need to rely on automation to do that. And that's what he talked about. And the fourth was really columnar compression. Now, individually, none of these technologies are that radical or any of themselves that disruptive, nor were they necessarily invented by Oracle. Others are introducing these innovations. What Oracle did was, however, package those into Exadata and is doing a fabulous job of marketing and executing, and that has really disrupted the business in a big way. The sun acquisition has really changed the company quite dramatically. We talked earlier about the financial analysis of Oracle. You can't not be impressed with the performance of the company financially. The firm has maintained outstanding operating margins, about 38% last quarter. That compares to 36% for Microsoft. I believe somewhere in the high 20s for SAP, which is very good. Take a company like EMC that prints cash, 15% operating margins, roughly. I'm using rough figures from top of my head. Apple is quite high. Not as high as Oracle. And so this is post-acquisition of sun. Oracle, it's stated goals. Africa has stated the goal that it wants to return to pre-sun acquisition operating margins of roughly 42%. Now that is unheard of in this business. A lot of that operating margin is coming from maintenance. Oracle's got, we've said it before, they've got the customer lock-in, mother of all lock-ins with the Oracle platform. But the company continues to deliver new products that its customer base wants at a pace that's quite fast. Oracle spends a lot of money on R&D, over $4 billion a year. And that has allowed the company to keep pace with the industry. And very importantly, I wouldn't consider it. Nobody really considers, on our team anyway, Oracle the V innovator. They consider them a follower, but a fast follower, a fast enough follower. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is Oracle will introduce innovations into its product line at almost the perfect right time to allow customers to evaluate, to essentially freeze the market on the competition, get its act together, and eventually keep its customers on its platforms. What's an example? A good example is SAP's HANA platform. We heard a lot about that at SAP Sapphire in May. And customers are really enthused about it. It's an in-memory appliance. It's a platform, an architecture that allows you to do analytics in memory, dramatic improvements in performance. Well, Oracle, this week we heard about exolitics, and which is an in-memory platform. Clearly, its marketing is positioning to maintain the Oracle customer base, it deposition some of the competitors, freezes the market on them. Same thing with big data. You saw Oracle announce a Hadoop appliance this week. You think of Hadoop, you think of unstructured data. The wrap on Hadoop, essentially, is the following. Back in the day, if you had a big data problem, you'd go out and you'd buy the biggest honking-as-sun server you could, and you'd buy a bunch of Oracle licenses. And if you had any money left over, you might do some development, you might do some marketing. That was the approach. Well, when Google started to crawl the web and needed to index the entire web, it realized it couldn't put everything into a relational database management system. So what it did is it invented MapReduce. And MapReduce allowed Google to deal with unstructured data, leave it in a distributed fashion, and then others saw that, Doug Cutting in particular, and began to develop what is now known as Hadoop, the Hadoop project, which is an open source Apache project, and it's really taken off. And it's really defined, it's the poster child, I should say, of big data. And so it's a lot of unstructured data. It's not hierarchical, not a lot of two-phase commits going on, and a lot of things that you would normally see in a traditional Oracle database environment. Very unstructured, very loose. Trying to draw inferences from distributed data all over the web. Data scientists hacking away at data. That's what the big data movement has become. Well, here comes Oracle in saying, well, you know what? We're going to develop a connector to Hadoop. And we're going to let Hadoop go off and do all that crazy processing that it's doing. But when you get the really important data that you want, we're going to bring that into the data warehouse. And we're going to do additional analytics on that. Now, whether or not that is the right approach, or if that's a boat anchor, remains to be seen. Some people, the purists, we're going to say, well, that's a legacy approach and it's just going to slow down big data. Others are going to say in the enterprise, well, that actually fits the bill for me because I need a single version of the truth. So, and I think that in general, big data and traditional data warehouses are going to complement each other and you're going to see that feeding, as I mentioned. Okay, so we are just about out of time today and appreciate you guys watching. We're going to bring in Mark, Riz and Hopkins and just do a recap on the day today. So, Mark, come on in here. I think we've still got a good audience watching. Yeah, a big audience. It's been an amazing day for people just happening by and to this Oracle Open World coverage that we've got going here. So, Mark, you and I and Qian and others have been doing events now for about a year and a half. Roughly. Oracle Open World, this is our second time here. We've done EMC World a couple of times, SAP Sapphire. We did Citrix Synergy this year. Yeah. We had Duke World, Strata. What's your take on Oracle Open World and the vibe here? Well, it's actually, it's fun because it's fun to kind of fly in. For us in our unique position, it's fun for us. It's more fun than the other shows because we get to just come in here and with like no attachments, say whatever we want. That to me is a little bit more fun rather than to come in and, if we feel an affinity to some of the other companies that we cover and some of the other industry conferences, like you go into EMC World and we're actually digging in and sometimes it's not quite as fun to sit there and, okay, we got to learn about, but it's like school, right? We got to learn about the products and all the new things that are being announced. The Oracle Open World, it's, first of all, I mean, we dub it Oracle Close World. I mean, we start out with a joke and they just go from there, right? Yeah, so, right. But in terms of a vibe, though, it's definitely less, it's less of a community atmosphere. I think it's obviously more getting business done like SAP is, kind of an SAP business conference. Yeah, you know, I thought Ray Wang hit it because my feeling is that SAP was even more business oriented, really articulating the business value there. Senior management messaging was all around that business value, whereas Oracle, you know, their senior management got pretty techy. They were a lot of speeds and feeds and somebody was joking and maybe not joking, but basically mentioning, hey, that's a lot of sun messaging. But that's how Oracle's competing and it's obviously working, but the CIOs at the, well, I think it was a bigger CIO audience at Sapphire is the sense that I got. Yeah, I would agree. Yeah, and then at Synergy was sort of a mix, right? A lot of desktop folks. That was a unique conference, wasn't it? It was interesting, wasn't it? Yeah, it was more desktop oriented than anything that we've been to, I think. First time we actually sat down with Panologic. First time that we- Wise. Wise. I mean, we knew, I've known about the thin client for ages and it's just the first time I had my eyes open to- Larry Ellison and Scott McNeely introduced us to the skin thin client, right? Exactly, right. So, yeah, so that was good. But what about mobile? I mean, we have not heard much talk about mobile. Got the iPhone 5 coming out tomorrow. Tomorrow is going to be one of the biggest days in mobile. I mean, there's, I've been sitting here going through the list of rumors as to which ones that we're going to bring up and talk about as we close out today. But bottom line is is this closed door Apple announcement tomorrow is going to be one of the biggest in recent company history and it's just got to dominate the news outside of Oracle. Inside of Oracle and keep in mind we haven't done all of our feet on the ground research on this yet, but inside of Oracle our editorial team feels that they're kind of weak in the mobile department. If you look at the sponsor list of the mobile pavilion, there's six sponsors list of six exhibitors. That's like Jabra, well, because Verizon is there. There's some big names, but there's only six of them, right? Yeah, and it just didn't feel like there was a lot of innovation going on. And there wasn't a lot of messaging. There wasn't any messaging really around mobile and the keynotes, at least that I heard. And I'm curious and somewhat concerned about that because I thought it played very well at both Sapphire and Synergy, Citrix Synergy. And the discussion with the CIOs that we had was all around the app store for the enterprise. And in particular, we had a number of CIOs at Sapphire that said, yeah, we're building an app store. That's where we want to go. And that's all about mobile. And Oracle's huge application company haven't heard anything about that vision. It's really, I think what we've learned from all the other places it stops on the summer tour is that you can't talk about enterprise anymore without discussing mobile. And Oracle just kind of with the keynote and the open and the general marketing of the entire event said, oh, yes, you can. You could talk about enterprise when I talk about mobile because we're not going to do it. It's mind boggling to me. And I guess the concern is that Oracle doesn't make a ton of mistakes. So what are we missing here? I mean, is it just that Oracle's late to the game and going to come in eventually and scoop up some mobile companies and get into the business? Or is it strategy simply to enable the backend infrastructure? Yeah, well, I mean, that's, they do seem to have a more of a pure infrastructure approach to everything on the software and the hardware side. So that may be the thinking there. Mobile in general is a very ultra competitive, right? Why jump into an ultra competitive market where you're not going to have the advantage, where you have the advantage in just about every other place where you compete, you know? Well, I mean, Java's powering a lot of mobile. Yeah, and they've got their fingers in it, but they're not really... It doesn't seem to be a fundamental part of the strategy. It's certainly not part of the messaging. Right. And I wonder if that's because they don't see how to make a ton of money out of it yet. Yeah, I think it must be it. Although you would think that enabling the app store for the enterprise and enabling Oracle apps to run on mobile devices in an aggressive way would give it competitive advantage. Although you could argue that Oracle does have a mobile strategy and it's entirely run by the legal department, you know? The whole Java lawsuit thing, you know? Right, which, you know, I'm not a lawyer, but I've done, I've read the terms, I've read the licensing agreement and it looks to me like that lawsuit has merit. Yeah, Clint Finley wrote about it today over on services angle. Glenn Manchin is a legal, occasional legal contributor to Silicon Angle who's written about it from time to time. And, yeah, there's something there. Everybody agrees that it's a very evil move. I mean, no question about it. It's kind of a jerk move, but, you know, it's not being tossed out, right? Yeah, well, I mean, I don't think Oracle cares if people like them, that's not their primary objective. Yes. All right, so iPhone news tomorrow. We'll be covering that. We'll be back here for day two. Let's see, day two. What do we got day two tomorrow? I don't have the schedule handy. I know we got a bunch of guests coming on. We got some spotlights going on. We got some folks from Intel, I believe. I'm looking forward to the Intel discussion. They're always interesting folks. Yeah, hopefully we'll have David Fleuer on. Yes. He's done a critical analysis of the Spark 4 Supercluster. That's up on Wikibon. Now's a good time. I mean, for those of you who aren't familiar with Oracle and all the parlance associated with Oracle, all the acronyms and all the buzzwords, check out siliconangle.com. Check out siliconangle.tv. You'll see some of the videos here. Check out wikibon.org, great resources. Search away, ask a question, hit edit, write a tip. If you can't find what you need, let us know. You can tweet us at wikibon, at siliconangle. You are at Risen, right? I'm at Risen. At Furrier, at D. Volante. You'll let us know what you want. We'll try our best to get it for you. So, great day today. Yes. You know, huge day, actually. Yeah. I'm looking forward to tomorrow. You can only get better, right? Yeah, so do we have any more guests on? No, we are guest list for the rest of the day. It's kind of closing. I mean, people are starting to make their way towards the exits, so. All right, good. So, okay, well, I guess we're a wrap. Thanks for watching, everybody. This is Dave Volante of wikibon.org. And I'm here with Mark Risen Hopkins of SiliconANGLE. Mark, thanks for helping me close today. Yes, absolutely. And we will see you at 10 a.m. Pacific Time tomorrow. Thanks for watching, everybody. Bye for now.