Openworld: Oracle jumps on in-memory analytics and big data bandwagons

Larry Ellison, Oracle's chief executive officer, opened the Oracle OpenWorld conference yesterday with an introduction to the company's new Exalytics appliance, which is designed to perform in-memory analytics and will compete with the Hana in-memory analytics engine from SAP.

The appliance is based on a Sun Fire server featuring 1TB of RAM, and an Intel Xeon E7-4800 processor with 40 cores. It also features Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle Essbase for data processing, and the Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database.

Other announcements from Oracle yesterday included the Big Data Appliance. This is designed to help organisations manage and assess data from social media feeds, smart meters, sensors and blogs.

It features an open source distribution of Apache Hadoop, Oracle NoSQL Database, Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop and Oracle Loader for Hadoop.

The head of Oracle's database server technologies, Andrew Mendelsohn, said that the company is not merely looking to handle large stores with its Big Data Appliance, but to provide additional intelligence for administrators and executives by analysing new sources of information.

Mendelsohn explained that Oracle will pitch the Big Data Appliance as a companion to its Exadata platform and as an additional tool for understanding customer behaviour rather than just another repository for information.

"Big is interesting, but traditional warehouses deal with that quite well. What is new here is the variety on the data side," he said.

Oracle also revealed that it is now providing support for its JD Edwards EnterpriseOne enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution on the Apple iPad.

Oracle has also released an iPad application for Field Service Work Order, ready for download for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.0 customers.

Ovum analyst Carter Lusher said the Exalaytics appliance is a good example of Oracle's "high performance, low cost" approach.

However, Lusher criticised Ellison's speech as lacking in inspiration and focusing too narrowly on the hardware business.

"It would have been better if he had tied up the entire portfolio to give a more coherent vision of where Oracle stands, providing the audience with an overview of Oracle's vision and strategy."

Oracle's main competitor, IBM, was mentioned by Ellison in his keynote speech.

"We should be able to build faster computers than IBM and have the best cost-performance in the industry," Ellison said.

Lusher believes that IBM and Oracle hold a similar space in the market and lead the way as "mega vendors" in that they offer such a broad range of products and services.

Lusher also argued that many of Oracle's strengths can also be seen as weaknesses.

For example, having a broad range of product areas can be a weakness as the product range can appear too complex to customers.

In addition, acquisitions are a big part of the reason that Oracle is in its strong position, but it takes time to understand how these will affect the business, and they may affect it negatively as well as positively.

Oracle OpenWorld runs until 6 October.