#OOW10 Night One (well, five minutes of it, anyway)

It's strange how your priorities change when you're not in the midst of the firehose.

I had every intention of listening to the Sunday evening keynote online. I wanted to hear what both Oracle and HP had to say (and not just for the soap opera reasons). Oracle was sharing the keynote online at http://www.oracle.com/us/openworld/index.htm, so I would be able to hear it, even though I'm not in San Francisco. (Actually, one year when I WAS in San Francisco, I went back to my hotel room to listen to the Sunday keynote online; I wasn't feeling well that evening and didn't feel like braving Moscone.)

And I did listen to the keynote - for about five minutes.

You see, my wife and I wanted to go to dinner, and we had to do some shopping for the daughter, and I had to do some shopping for "Project Joe," and this, and that...

But I enjoyed the five minutes that I did hear, which featured Oracle's good buddy Ann Livermore of HP. The tweets that I saw while Livermore spoke characterized her speech as boring and devoid of innovation, but I thought that she made some good points.

First off, she made the point that Larry Ellison wasn't the only company acquirer in the room, and that HP had been making acquisitions of its own. (See my previous post.)

Second off, she noted that HP has an extensive services business. Although she didn't say it, HP (with its EDS acquisition) and IBM are known for offering services; Oracle really isn't.

Maybe Livermore isn't the most riveting speaker in the world, but she knew what she was saying.

In addition, it was worthwhile to hear Livermore since, as Jean-Louis Gassee recently speculated, she, or co-presenter David Donatelli, may end up running HP at the end of the day.

But I missed Larry Ellison's speech, which (obviously) Oracle itself covered. And it appears that Oracle is starting to provide services also, though not quite of the EDS variety:

"What is cloud computing?" he asked rhetorically. "It's elastic, it's virtualized, and you pay only for what you use."

He then introduced the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, the world's first and only integrated middleware machine. "It's a cloud in a box," said Ellison, "that you scale from a quarter rack up to eight racks as a cloud.

"That's one big honkin' cloud."

I guess that fits the definition of an extremely private cloud. More later.

Ellison also talked about an "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel," and briefly talked about Oracle Fusion Applications - but Ellison will say more on that during his traditional Wednesday keynote.

Meanwhile, Oracle OpenWorld moves on, and the Monday sessions will begin shortly...and I'm paying attention to entirely different news - which, for obvious reasons (I am a Safran employee), I have nothing to say about at this time. Other than to note that, based upon previous experience, an acquisition such as this can take some time to finalize, based upon all the worldwide government approvals that are required.