Open World 2009, Day 1

Open world opened officially today... but I got there early for the "soft opening," including the briefing for my fellow Oracle ACE Directors. We had a surprise Q&A visit from Thomas Kurian himself. If I had known, I would have surely had a much bigger list of questions for him! Nevertheless, I learned quite a bit about Oracle's future product strategy. I can't share what I learned until after the conference, tho... they are planning a few announcements.

We kept trying to extract some info on the future of Sun product lines... but the Oracle folks were very tight-lipped about it. The European Union has not yet approved the merger -- mainly because of MySQL -- so they can't say a thing about it yet.

Some interesting news I'd like to highlight:

• The Social Schedule Builder for Open World: my friend Chris Bucchere integrated his popular conference schedule builder with Oracle Mix... so if you have a Mix account you can use this to organize your conference. If you find Oracle's default Schedule Builder to be too clunky, check out this one. And since it was released a full 2 days before the conference, its perfect for procrastinators.
• Try Out Amazon Web Services For Free:provided you're at the conference, and you show up at the Fusion Middleware Lounge on Floor 3 of Moscone West. Some Amazon folks should be there to give you a quick tutorial, and let you test it our for free.
• Oracle is giving away 400 copies of my book. If you registered for the Information Overload add on, you get an electronic copy of my latest book. Not sure if that's a good sign for book sales or not...

I'll be heading to a few more sessions and user groups today... and I'm sure I'll have some updates after the main keynote.

UPDATE: the Sunday keynote just ended... and since Oracle was nice enough to give me press credentials, I thought I should post my thoughts ASAP. They were still pretty hush-hush about what the acquisition will mean. The three big questions are:

1. What will happen to MySQL?
2. What will happen to Sun's hardware division?
3. What will happen to Java?

That first question was the big one... it's probably the main reason why the EU has not yet approved of the merger. Well, Scott McNeally made the obvious point that MySQL doesn't compete with Oracle; it competes with Microsoft SQL Server. Also, Oracle acquired two other open-source databases -- Sleepy Cat and Innobase -- and has increased R&D for them. Larry Ellison himself said Oracle promises to spend more resources on MySQL than Sun does right now. Given Oracle's past history with Open Source databases, I'm prone to trust Larry on this one. They'll likely use it as a wedge to get some of Microsoft's business when a company doesn't need Oracle's performance.

Oracle also seems to be committed to expanding Sun's hardware division. IBM tried to use the tiresome "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt" to scare existing Sun customers to dump SPARC in favor of IBM hardware... But I don't think so. The new stuff they showed off -- like the 4 Terabyte F5100 FLASH memory array -- was really innovative stuff. McNeally said you can get 4x I/O throughput by just bolting this on to existing storage infrastructure... not to mention ultra-low power consumption, and much more compact compared to IBM's stuff. Larry even issued a challenge: if you are an IBM hardware customer, and Oracle can't make your system run TWICE as fast on Sun hardware, they will give you $10 million dollars. IBM was explicitly invited to try.

End of the day, Sun's hardware is better than IBM, IBM is Oracle's new enemy, and Larry likes to win. Ain't no way that stuff is going away...

Regarding Java, I don't think there was ever a question there... Oracle is heavily invested in Java, and is a big contributor. They are going to keep that thing going as long as they can. James Gosling himself was up on stage, saying he looked forward to the acquisition... because then he'd finally be working for a software company!

Har...

Overall, I think that was a really good way to soothe Sun customers, Open Source advocates, the EU, and Java Bunnies everywhere.