I spent last week at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in S.F. I've been attending this conference for several years as I have been an Oracle DBA for several years. A couple of things that struck me as interesting this year were the following. SUN was the co-sponsor on monday and on tuesday their stock was up 2 and 9/16. On Tuesady, Intel was the co-sponsor and the next day their stock was up about 6 points and Oracle was up 2 (Larry spoke on tuesday also). When I went to the keynote addresses, several hundred seats up front were reserved for the press and for stock analysts. I came away realizing that the stock analysts will buy any story that is told to them. By the end of the week, after speakers from Intel, HP and Compaq had refuted what Scott McNealy had to say on Monday, SUN's stock was back to where it began.
I also came away realizing that Larry's message that the internet will change the face of computing is very true. When an application resides on the internet, it can be accessed from anywhere in the world, when an application is based in windows on your PC on your desktop, it can be accessed from only one place in the world, your desktop. For DBA's using Oracle's Enterprise Manager, the current version is a client server app that runs on the desktop. The version that will be released with 8i is written in Java and lives on the web server (middle tier). Using that version,I can then do my job from anywhere in the world,not just from my desk. This is only one example of how internet computing is changing things. I also realized what a poor job of selling NCA Larry Ellison had done in the past. He is a weak presenter and his NC story was the wrong way to go about presenting the concept that companies and individuals would benifit from deploying their applications on the web versus on the desktop. I have come to believe than three tier computing architecture is rapidly replacing client server computing. I think that is what Ellision should have been saying all along, instead of how NC's would replace PC's. If the app is on the web, all you need is a browser and who cares whether the browser resides on a fat client or a thin client. Whatever makes the most sense for the indivdual or the company. I think Oracle has so many business partners and is so well positioned that the biggest problem facing them is finding enough talented people to deploy their technology. |
