 SiliconANGLE.tv and wikibon.org present Oracle Open World 2011. And now, host John Furrier and Dave Vellante on theCUBE. Okay, welcome everyone to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.tv's presentation of theCUBE here at Oracle Open World 2011. My name is John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com and I'm here with... I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org and we are here covering all the angles, SiliconANGLE.tv, SiliconANGLE.com and wikibon.org. If you've got questions, come on to the sites. We'll be covering the show like a blanket, John. SiliconANGLE.com and wikibon's flagship telecast, theCUBE goes to the top events in the industry, goes out, extracts a signal from the noise and shares that knowledge with you. And we're here excited because Oracle is the big, bad 500 pound gorilla Dave on the marketplace and they're making a lot of money. They've got a huge ecosystem. They have a certain strategy that's different than everyone else's but they attract the biggest and brightest customers and industry players to this event and we're going to cover it for three days. For the next three days, eight hours a day, in depth, guests, spotlights, our normal commentary, controversial opinions, bring it to you live, unfiltered here on the ground floor where again, year two Dave, we snuck in to Oracle. We did not get an official invite to broadcast so we sneak into QLogic's booth here. QLogic was kind enough to donate half their booth to us so we want to thank QLogic for supporting us here. Great spot here in the QLogic booth and we'll be broadcasting as you said, John, for three days and another point you made is Oracle is different, aren't they? They don't just follow everybody else. They march to their own drummer, don't they? Yeah, I mean, Oracle is a big company and as we say, the big, bad, evil, 500 pound gorilla and some people say they're doing a good job but Larry Ellison's keynote last night really exemplifies Oracle's kind of culture. They just come out there, it's like racing the sailboats. They've got competition, they go after them hard and they promote their stuff and quite frankly, they don't care. They just want to steamroll the industry. Well, you were at the keynote last night and it got kind of mixed reviews, didn't it? That being kind there but I was there today. You were there last night, give us your take and I'll take you through what we heard today. Well, I think someone's going to get fired for that keynote because Larry Ellison's teleprompter kind of crashed and he kind of was flailing and twisting in the wind, actually turning around presentation 101, never look at the slides. He actually turned around looking at the monitor and he was prepped a bit but he definitely was winging it and at the end he abruptly left the stage and I tweeted at that time, someone will be fired. So it was, I heard it was a big exodump. A lot of exologic, exadata, exa, mega, exa. I mean, I was a classic Larry Ellison trying to be Steve Jobs. I actually was critical of his keynote. I thought it was horrible but I liked Larry up there. To me, seeing Larry doing his thing, industry legend, I've been watching him for 15 years at these events and the billionaire rolls in, does his thing, Mark hers in the front row and then now with Twitter you have a whole nother event going on, kind of simultaneously. So to me I thought the keynote was classic, Oracle, lay out the agenda, all hardware, all performance, ex of this, ex of that. So clearly they're going hard at a closed integrated system, a lot of Apple on the consumer side. So clearly that's the play for Oracle and Larry did his thing. As you said, depositioning the competition, putting Oracle in positive light. He did not zing and throw anyone under the bus. He did throw terror data under the bus at one point but I think we'll see Larry, as you said, at the Wednesday's keynote, just to trash everyone. Yeah, so this morning we heard from EMC's executives, EMC's Joe Tucci who's been on theCUBE and Pat Gelsinger who's a many time CUBE alum. They were up on stage for a long time actually. I don't know, they must have shelled out some serious dough for that but I don't know how that works but they had some great face time with the audience. The place was packed, they had very strong messaging I thought around VMware, Cloud and big data. And they did so respectfully because it's Oracle's home court so they're not going to trash Oracle even though Oracle's probably going to trash EMC on Wednesday but they were very strong I thought. The messaging was good. They talked about positioning things like Hadoop and Green Plum alongside of Oracle which of course is not going to be Oracle's messaging I would imagine. Well I've been Oracle yesterday, Larry's keynote. I don't think he used the word big data once in a slide. He actually positioned the whole big data evolution more like, you know, you saying words like unstructured, multi-dimensional data. He actually didn't even come out and use the word big data so clearly Oracle has no interest in promoting anything like Hadoop or anything like that unless they acquire like a Cloudera. So, you know, to me when I heard about this I'm like, wow, Cloudera would be a great acquisition for Oracle. Michaels and Solt is coming to Oracle knows how to deal with those guys but if they bought Cloudera they would have an open source trifecta they'd have Java, they'd have MySQL and then they'd have the unstructured. So, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if Oracle's kicking the tires on Cloudera. Well, they announced some Hadoop appliance this week and so, but I just wanted to share with you as well the EMC had Chad Sacketsch up on stage another CUBE alum doing all kinds of crazy demos and usually these demos are pretty dry, right? You've seen them before and it's point and click and provisioning databases, woo! But he got the crowd going pretty well and the way they did it is they were running social graphs doing a demo of an insurance company seeing what the insurance rate would be for Gelsinger and then they ran one for Tucci showing him driving fast cars and it was good tongue-in-cheek and then they started doing Ellison, the boat and everything else and Pat of course cut Chad off after that and it was quite funny, the audience was laughing and then Heard came up and he really didn't give a presentation he just sort of played some videos. What was his insurance policy like? Yeah, well, yeah, there you go. Some serious premiums on that. So Heard basically played a video, a mind-melting, face-melting video on Oracle like 20 of the 20 top banks, 20 of the 20 top telcos, 10 times faster, 17 times faster, 50 times better, that kind of video and in that video they were, I think it was Safra Katz who's making comments, we are big data in the cloud too. I mean Oracle, you know Oracle yesterday I made a tweet that got retweeted a lot and Ellison wants to be the Steve Jobs of the industry enterprise and he made again the reference this year that like Apple, it's proprietary, it's closed and that works for them, creates amazing products but I tweeted and said, hey, Steve Jobs disrupted an industry, music, all kinds with cloud and everything else and consumer, Oracle's really not disrupting anything they are an incumbent so to me they're like this big company it's extracting rents and all the big accounts so of course they got the top accounts they bought out the entire industry and it's evil everyone else so Oracle has a huge presence so it's easy for them to flash those slides but to me, I don't see Oracle really innovating like the way Apple did on the consumer side I think they just have a huge presence, they aren't incumbent, clearly that's why the message of performance was driven home I think Larry, I'll see you with this whole sailing mentality, competitiveness wants to use performance as his main sales inhibitor differentiator so I think that's a good move for Oracle and that's what an incumbent would do Yeah well, I mean, you're right and of course we've obviously pointed out the warts in Oracle over the past several, you know, a couple of cube gigs and years but the numbers speak for themselves I wanted to comment on what I wanted to make though Oracle was founded by Ellison and I believe his other co-founders in 1977 and he's outlasted Gates, he's outlasted Jobs he's obviously outlasted Grove but Grove is older than Ellison he's outlasted them all, he's still hanging tough he's engaged and the numbers don't lie I mean this company threw off $12.3 billion in free cash flow in the last four quarters which is absolutely astounding I'll give you some other stats on operating profit Oracle's operating profit, post the Sun acquisition is 38% last quarter and they're claiming Saffir Katz is claiming they will get to the low 40s again which is 42% pre-Sun acquisition just here's some comparisons with that Microsoft 36%, this is operating margins SAP 27%, IBM 18%, EMC 15%, Hewlett Packard 8% I missed Apple at 33%, so Oracle's the king of operating profit and they're going post Sun acquisition even higher so we've talked about in the past that Sun acquisition, Oracle bought Sun for about 5.6 billion, it's trading at four times revenue that acquisition's worth around 28 billion now to Oracle shareholders, that's a $22 billion return in less than two years and that's pretty amazing Larry's not a dummy, I mean first of all I just want to say I liked to see Larry up on the stage I agree with you, started the company in 1977 he maverick, he rolls up on stage, does his thing everyone's laughing but it's really no joke it's kind of fun to watch and he's leading a huge company, the numbers speak for themselves but at the end of the day the Sun acquisition is a good deal and that's the ultimate trophy for Larry because back in the day the Sun was dominating and that's a nice trophy picked up from McNeely and company for a song at the time and now obviously leveraging it what's interesting is after watching the keynote yesterday all I could think about was HP the whole conversation around hardware was absolutely in my opinion a direct strike at HP saying hey you want to talk hardware we'll talk speeds and feeds, we'll talk all day long about performance and kind of trash the blade servers commodity blade servers but clearly you see Oracle looking like HP in that keynote not a lot of talk of software not a lot of talk about databases he kind of obviously talked about performance with exadata, et cetera, next analytics but for the most part to me the next trophy for Larry will be HP, Carish Wishart, all things D said there's no way that they'll buy HP but absolutely in their war room I can guarantee you there's a big acquisition of HP hostile takeover bid going on and obviously we report on siliconangle.com that HP is the higher Goldman to protect their interest against shareholder for reconfiguration so the civil war with an HP still goes on, their targets on their back Larry's got them lined up perfectly That's an interesting scenario John and I think it's definitely going on there At the last quarterly financial analyst meeting Ellison made this statement let me be clear on this I don't care if our x86 business goes to zero so his commodity x86 business he means so if there were to be an HP acquisition you can be sure that it would be a different looking company I mean they go after them HP doesn't want to be acquired they're going to be hostile takeover if the price drops low Oracle will roll in there and it's the ultimate trophy in my opinion but that being said HP has got organizational issues they're resolving Meg Whitman's the new CEO Ray Lane kind of chairman, active chairman ex Oracle they hate each other Larry and Ray so I think the move to get rid of Leo Apatecker fast was a good move, pay him the severance, move on the guy was not a good fit, Meg Whitman can bring that Silicon Valley mojo to HP and HP's got to fight back I think HP can't take any more punches from Oracle they're going to have to throw a few back How much dough did Leo take out of SAP? Was it 30 million? No, 12 million was the severance 12 million out of SAP? Out of SAP? Oh no HP, I don't know, I don't know what he did He only lasted at SAP for 10 months as CEO I thought he took 30 and I thought he's ultimately taking 30 out of HP I was saying if he doesn't one more time it'll be a hundred million dollars I mean not bad for getting fired twice and you know that's a great career path just pop in, over inflate your expertise and then get fired with severance why don't I do that? Yeah It's like damn So Dave, so the question that I want to ask you is let's compare and contrast last year and this year I know it's early day one we're going to go do a drill down we'll be here, wall-to-wall coverage of Oracle Open World but you know last year the vibe was kind of silent Oracle was throwing cloud in the box out there and the ecosystem was all here all present and accounted for but there wasn't a lot of vibe I mean everyone's kind of like almost scared so the ecosystem at Oracle is like SAP robust, there's a ton of dollars in the ecosystem but not a lot of energy like rah rah Oracle more like okay Oracle's just this big machine Well one of the big things that's different this year and last year is Oracle had just picked up Mark Hurd and they were going through a lawsuit and so HP was one of the few companies last year that Oracle didn't throw under the bus as you know and I would expect well it's already we've already seen pre-Oracle Open World with the whole autonomy rift that's changed the other thing that's changed is you know you heard a lot of marketing hyperbole with Exadata and Exologic last year but again the numbers don't lie I mean this product is kick and butt in the marketplace you're talking about a 150 district new customers in the quarter that bought Exadata a hundred actually brand new Exadata customers so I mean it's selling like crazy so a lot of people criticize it I've criticized it but why is Exadata selling so well? Here's why in fact Thomas Curian talked today about the secret sauce behind Exadata and he pointed to four things which are not that radical offloading storage functions to the disk something they call smart scanning something that EMC has been doing for years fast connectivity which is really infinite band and you know Q-Logic we're here in the Q-Logic booth they do a lot of infinite band stuff hierarchical storage management and heuristics that match data and device characteristics putting the hot data into flash and the cold data onto you know cheaper slower spinning disk and columnar compression those are four areas that you know aren't really anything radical but the packaging and the marketing and the execution of that business has been brilliant and that's really why it's being so successful So I'm just looking at Twitter here getting some feedback from folks out there that said the stream might not be working well if I check your browser Mark, you can just check the feed and we're on the floor here at Oracle Open World normally when we go to the events with the cube which we call the sports center the ESPN of tech we usually get a marquee location but Oracle would not let us kind of come in there and do that this year so we kind of got in through some support of Q-Logic go to Q-Logic.com they make fiber channel all the high-end you know networking adapters and switches for high-band with you know connectivity you know we heard Allison talking about a finnaband we'll come back to that in a minute but so we're here in Oracle and we snuck in they supported us here with the booth and we're going to do our normal independent live coverage of the event wall to wall we're going to analyze the keynotes talk to guests get their opinion extract the signal from the noise and for the folks out there on Twitter the hashtag is oracle open O O W 11 and then our hashtag is pound the cube fires some questions off to us if you want us to to address anything we will happy to talk candidly we're not afraid to hold back our opinions with an analysis so John you know a lot about big data and and Hadoop I mean you basically exposed us at Wikibon to that whole trend a couple years ago and Oracle this week has announced a Hadoop appliance they're basically throwing their hat in the ring and then the big data the big data and their vision is that essentially that Oracle databases will be the final resting place for all that distributed big data Alison says we've been doing unstructured data for a long long time this is nothing new to us what's your take on that is oracle you know the center of the big data universe or is oracle a boat anchor to big data uh... boat anchors actually good posts and you guys had a post on that that was excellent excellent analysis I think you know depends how you look at it I mean the trend of big iron was a mainframe concept you know the many many computer days the term glass house big iron for us old guys and over forty years old those those words mean something so so we're kind of going back to that cloud version of what a mainframe was or glass house so the notion of big iron something that comes out so if you look at the keynote yesterday you see big iron kind of concepts parallelism uh... parallel everything is what they're promoting that's essentially kind of a systems concept engineered specifically around uh... special purpose computing etc etc so that being said given oracle size dave and their opinion of I mean their their their opinion of how tech should go and their incumbent place in the big accounts yeah they are by default a major major player in big data if you define big data as having the database running a lot of these these production systems however that being said the trend is to move towards more of a decentralized client server like environment in a cloud so if you want to say there's a mainframe in the cloud you can also say there's a distributed software and many client server uh... architecture that's being promoted by SAP and others I don't think that oracle will be the resting place for data in the database I think that the database wars were going to continue I think you're going to see no sequel no database philosophy come out where you're going to see people engineer around oracle so you know my vision is that oracle will continue to be a player extracting rents from the marketplace but ultimately you're going to see new incumbents engineer around oracle putting stuff in front of an acceleration with SSD using software techniques and things like Hadoop et cetera now one of the things I would observe as you know oracle Ellison last year said we're going to spend four billion dollars this year on R&D and why stop there that's a serious change and Sam Palmasano of IBM said I worry about oracle I don't worry about HP I worry about oracle because they spend money on R&D so to oracle's credit while a lot of the technologies that they talk about aren't anything radically new they're not necessarily things that they invented they actually have the chops to actually spend money and deliver I mean let's be clear let's be just say you know with the elephants in the room everyone's afraid of oracle you know VMware's afraid of oracle I mean everyone's afraid of oracle they can have the market power to essentially stall any kind of proof of concept production movement of new concepts so whether it's a hypervisor or VMware or storage et cetera great point because you know we were at SAP Sapphire what was the big buzz of the show was SAP HANA right the in-memory analytics what did oracle announce Sunday night exolytics in-memory analytics right and what's that going to do that's going to freeze the market on HANA well the Twitter stream yesterday was pretty fun during the keynote is like it was kind of like a talk radio you know a lot of the folks you know stepped up and had some good tweets and some good content but after the Twitter stream died down after the keynote a lot of the thought leaders out there like Ray Wang and the analysts like Matt Eastwood et cetera and yourself and myself included we're on there talking about SAP and SAP actually had the mind share on the Twitter stream mainly because SAP's keynotes at Sapphire were so much more crisper from a market standpoint than Oracle Oracle talks speeds and feeds zeros and ones performance this and that SAP was much much specific around business value use cases and I thought their mobile story was compelling so I thought SAP had a significantly better message in the Sapphire conference than Oracle did yesterday I know it's early and that was part of the commentary and then people were talking about it Ray Wang's going to come on later today at one o'clock Pacific time and we're going to talk specifically about SAP products because Ray Wang's assertion Dave is that SAP's products really aren't really making it so we're going to talk to Ray at one o'clock today Ray Wang from Constellation Group great analyst covering the enterprise space we'll talk with him yeah he's a straight shooter so we're going to get to the bottom of that but so SAP has their challenges I talked to the SAP folks last night and they told me that you know hey we're ready to up our game and show the world that Madrid in November first week in November in Madrid Sapphire Europe's going to be there so we'll stay tuned they just had a very successful tech ed which we covered extensively in Silicon Anker Wookiee bonds so you know SAP is not a shrinking violet and they'll punch back so not afraid to pull the punches yeah I mean we've been at Sapphire now two years in a row and I like the vibe I think you're absolutely right John real emphasis on business value SAP is all about business and the other big message of course as you know is mobile and I question you know where is Oracle and mobile computing it seems their main mobile strategy is to you know use its Java ownership to sue the Android ecosystem right I mean you're seeing a lot of action there now I think the suit has merit I mean legally I'm not a lawyer but from what I've read and you know I've actually read the the license agreements that there is merit and they you know have every right to do that but what does that do for innovation what does that say about Oracle's you know commitment to innovation well Oracle's version of innovation is different than what an entrepreneur or you know venture capitalist and growing companies trying to take market share away and that is is that Oracle's clutching onto their accounts they're proud of their 350,000 customers as they said in the keynote they've had the top 20 this and that so Oracle is fighting their own cannibalization so so that's that that's what they have to do they have to essentially up their game and and Oracle's a master at stalling the marketplace and I think the keynote from Ellison to me speaks volumes that what they want to do is show the customers look at we can deliver performance there is no objection in the marketplace from a sales perspective that we can't sell around and then they use the power of the licensing agreements as we talked about last year to hold things in check so here HANA gets stalled by their exlytics Hadoop gets stalled with their no-sequel so Oracle's just really strong at competitive strategy got to give them that I have to say Oracle is very strong in maintaining their position and again I just don't see that that's counter to innovation that's holding on it's kind of like Microsoft holding on to windows well another thing that Ellison said recently is is again let me make it clear we have no interest in selling other people's IP we have interest in selling our own IP period that's what they're all about they define innovation in those terms well if they don't invent it they acquire it so he actually said that in the keynote yesterday times ten was the company he was in referencing to but I'm getting some you know tweets here from folks and comments on the online they say it's not about you know the product is about Larry and Larry is a showman I like watching him up on stage it's fun to watch even when he's bombing the keynote like he did yesterday and actually intimated he didn't actually say he was hungover he just said last night he was at his son's wedding in Palm Springs didn't sleep much which might be saying he just flew in so the slides teleprompter failed but overall fun keynote I was having a good time on Twitter I thought it was boring I hope he delivers a better job on Wednesday well it's always interesting when he talks about the competition which I'm sure is going to do on Wednesday now John we're going to shift gears a little bit here and dig into one of our spotlights as you know at VMworld this year we created this concept of spotlights and these are in-depth segments designed to help practitioners better understand a topic and they are sponsored segments the segment is sponsored by EMC backup and recovery group and we're going to look at Oracle backup so what John and I are going to do is have a little discussion about Oracle backup and some of the alternatives and options that DBAs and Oracle customers have and then we're going to drill in with some subject matter experts and we're going to talk to Steven Manley who's the CTO of EMC's BRS group we've got Steven Zay who's the senior vice president of SCI a CIO discussion and then we're going to go and deep into the technical side as well John so why don't we kick that off yeah I mean I think Dave I mean what people I just before we get started that I just want to say that you know people I talk in the industry all the time about you know this and that all the hot trends you know social networking cloud mobile social all the stuff we cover but when you hear what Larry Ellison is saying in his keynote one thing is coming clear with cloud and that is is that storage and we've been covering storage deep for over a year and a half now you've been doing it for very long time is the essence of the cloud so you talk about big data the database conversation it's all coming back to storage the storage equation is broken it's being transformed with SSDs and other things it's transforming this entire environment you throw virtualization into the mix it's absolutely transforming so what does that mean that means existing huge amounts of infrastructure going to be displaced and transition and one of them is back up in recovery which when you look at the tsunami in Japan to other events is critical and you know it's not talked about in the mainstream but you know there are some cool tech out there around virtualization that allows for the backup and recovery so it's a really important topic we hear a lot about it on on email and Twitter so I think it's it's critical that we