 Welcome to NewsDefs on SiliconANGLE TV for Monday, October 1, 2012. I'm Kristen Filetti. Oracle Open World kicked off Sunday, September 30, with Oracle founder Larry Ellison making several big announcements about the company's launch of a brand new cloud computing service. Joining us now to discuss Oracle's future with the cloud is SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier. Good morning, John. Good morning, San Francisco. So John, you and SiliconANGLE were on the ground. What was the scene like at the Oracle Open World opening keynote? It was a great scene as usual, Oracle Open World we've been following. It's our third straight year with our live cube at the show. And it kicks off always with Larry Ellison doing a keynote and the whole thing kicking off was great. It was a great scene. 50,000 people showed up, very, very large event. It is the biggest tech event in the business and headlined by Larry Ellison, the longstanding tech titan CEO, longest reigning CEO from the first generation computer business, and it was quite the show. Now Larry Ellison, a guy that once called cloud computing complete gibberish, is now offering clouds in every way that can be offered. Can you tell us about the different types of cloud computing Larry has proposed? Well, Larry was up there with his great flair and command performance. He was awesome. Larry Ellison is great to watch. I've been following him my entire career and he announced basically Oracle is now moving into the cloud. He did that last year. He amplified that with some new announcements kicking off the show. He'll come back on for a keynote again on Tuesday to continue to drive home more announcements. But he talked about offering infrastructure as a service, private cloud, a new database and their new Exadata product. And that was really quite a show and nothing new from the sense of the industry, but complete validation of some of the things we've been covering on Silicon Angle. Obviously the movement to the cloud is happening, not in the way that most people thought, but certainly it's threatening the on-premise infrastructure business and software business of Oracle. So it was quite an announcement and also a reaffirmation of their acquisition of Sun Microsystem, which we've said is probably their best acquisition ever, a total steal in the industry. And Oracle is absolutely pulling a Steve Jobs Apple for the enterprise where they're offering their own hardware to sit with their own software. So it was quite the announcement and it was all cloud and all about performance. Now, there are two versions of Oracle's new IAAS cloud. Can you tell us what they are and explain the differences between the two versions? Well, Oracle is a software company and they moved to the cloud last year with their software as a service or SaaS. This year they announced the infrastructure as a service, IAAS, infrastructure as a service, and this is really going after Amazon. And so in the spirit of one-upping all the competition, Larry Ellison assured the customers and the industry that they now have three levels of solutions, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service. And really comparing that to Amazon, which is really the one-dimensional company around infrastructure as a service, and then going after salesforce.com, which has platform as a service and software as a service. So Larry announced essentially all three things and highlighted a new database and new exa data storage. So all of this is kind of being wrapped around essentially cloud computing infrastructure as he calls modern infrastructure and all about storage and flash memory. Now is Oracle the only company offering private cloud service or are there others? There are a bunch of others. There was a quote on Twitter that said, you know, listen to Larry Ellison talk about cloud. And then Dan Marino talk about winning a Super Bowl, which if you follow the NFL, Dan Marino never won a Super Bowl. So Larry is a little bit late to the party relative to some of these announcements. But the size of Oracle is one that validates that the business is moving off-premise and into the cloud. And they want to offer that completely with infrastructure, platform, and software as a service, all running on their database. And so with the ownership of Sun, MicroSystem is the hardware, and also Java, Oracle is in a good position, and they were really kind of amplifying that heavily. What's Oracle's advantage or selling point over their competitors? And do you feel that their cloud strategy will be successful? Well their advantages over the competition are one that they're just a massive beast of a company. They are all over the place with massive installed base. They have implementations in the top companies around the world with their software, Oracle database, and a variety of their solutions, CRM, human resources, et cetera. Oracle has a huge presence, so they're already successful. It's really about maintaining their market share with the disruption of these new incumbents that are emerging out of the cloud business and also the software business. So their chances of success are good. They have a position, and they're really defending their position. So this whole keynote and this whole show is about Oracle trying to maintain their relevance in the marketplace to their customers. And with everything moving to the cloud, they don't want customers' business to be disrupted. That's their core message. At the same time, Larry Ellison is a huge performance geek. He loves speeds and feeds. And so all he talks about is speeds and feeds. And he went after the competition. I mean, Larry Ellison, last year, we reported through all their competitors on the bus, including kicking Mark Benioff out of the keynote at Salesforce.com. He went after EMC last year. No different this year. He went after EMC heavily. He called out EMC on their performance of their VMAX 40 and essentially shamed them with the Oracle Exadata solution. So he's being aggressive. He also called out IBM. So Oracle sees those guys as their competitors. No mention of HP, although there was one reference to SAP. So really the story here at Oracle is really going after SAP, their main competitor on the software side. But looking at EMC, HP, and IBM as their main competitors in the other parts of their business. And he absolutely took out the guns and started firing against those guys big time. Oracle's two new cloud services. We're just two of the four announcements that Oracle founder Larry Ellison made on Sunday. Can you tell us about the Oracle 12C? Yeah, 12C is their database. And essentially what they do is they're being disrupted by big data. There was not a lot of talk by about big data from Larry Ellison, the earlier keynote, the sponsored keynote from Physic2, talked about big data with real practical examples. But ultimately, big data is a tough concept for Oracle for a couple of reasons. One is all the innovation around big data is disrupting Oracle's business. So for them to essentially adopt big data is a very difficult position to take. It's a little bit of conflict. But also the core disrupting feature of Oracle that's being disrupted is the database. So Oracle announced 12C, a completely redefined database from Oracle to sit in the cloud. And that allows for all kinds of new functionality that they were promising, such as in-memory databases. And this really is, again, part of the commentary we've been providing around solid-state drives and flash memory, where you can have literally tons of memory in database in memory. And that's the core announcement of this 12C that it can run in memory. And the performance advantages are quite good there. So that was impressive. The other parts of their announcement were not that impressive, in my opinion, but overall Larry is clearly going after speeds and feeds of databases in memory. And that's a direct strike at two competitors, SAP, which has been promoting a product called Onna, an in-memory database technology that totally changed the game for performance of Oracle answers SAP. And the other one is EMC, which makes spinning disk drives. So the concept of storing and databases on disk and flash memory is one that affects EMC. So really, EMC and SAP were really, really called out with Oracle's announcements. Ellison also made an announcement about a new hardware product. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Yeah, they're actually announcing the Exadata product. And that is really, again, a strike against EMC. And what's interesting is that they're going after EMC's existing storage business. And that is something that's going to be interesting because Oracle needs to have a solution there to take advantage of their hardware. And also about EMC, it makes a lot of money from these drives. So it's really kind of an interesting discussion. But the main announcement is that the new systems from Oracle are essentially a sun-based hardware solution. And early on in the keynote, no one really picked up on this. And I made a tweet about it, but no one else really picked up on it. But Larry kind of briefly mentioned that they're going to have their own silicon for their hardware. And what this really means to the marketplace is that Larry Ellison is clearly implementing a hardware-specific solution for his software to run on. Oracle has been a software company, but now with the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, they are now putting all that effort into hardware. This is very similar to what Steve Jobs did with Apple with their devices starting at the Mac and then the iPod and then the iPhone and then now the iPad. So Larry Ellison wants to have that same philosophy for enterprise hardware and produce the fastest machines possible, whether they're in the cloud or on a customer site. So that is really the big announcement from Oracle. Well, John, thanks so much for joining us. And we'll talk to you soon. Right. And we'll be following Oracle Open World as it unfolds all this week. So for the latest in-depth coverage and breaking analysis, keep up to date with News Desk on SiliconANGLE TV, number one in tech event coverage. OK, days ready? Cool.