For the SaaS world, Oracle’s OpenWorld has lately been all about hardware and the Exastack products. These offerings have limited appeal to all but the largest SaaS ISV’s.   The good news is that there were some new announcements though that were much more interesting for the SaaS community at last week’s Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco.  Here is a quick summary of the news and drama:

Oracle Public Cloud

This was a welcome move by Oracle, to finally embrace their vision of the Cloud. Oracle is re-packaging many of their assets including the Exastack, Java, and the Oracle Database into a pay-as-you-go service, which should be appealing to smaller customers as well as ISV’s looking for an easier way to leverage Oracle technology.

The key theme that Larry Ellison [video] kept emphasizing was that the Oracle Public Cloud is standards-based and will allow a customer to port products they built on their Cloud to other standards-based Clouds or even on-premise. Larry was quite funny in his keynote by referring to his competitor’s Clouds as the “Roach Motel of Clouds”, because once you go in, you never come out.

In addition to just pure infrastructure services, Oracle will also make available its applications including Fusion CRM and Fusion HCM products as their collaboration platform.

Here are some other interesting articles on the Oracle Public Cloud:

• Ellison Reveals Oracle’s Public Cloud; Calls Salesforce The ‘Roach Motel’ Of Cloud Services, Rip Empson, TechCrunch.
• How Oracle’s Public Cloud Is Different, Charles Babcock, InformationWeek.
• Oracle Public Cloud might be extensive, but it’s boring, Larry Dignan, ZDNet.

Oracle Social Network

Sounds a little like that movie about Facebook. The Oracle social strategy is to provide an easy-to-use interface for both their new Fusion applications as well as the Oracle Public Cloud.

Their social network looks remarkably similar to the Chatter offering from Salesforce.com. The Oracle Social Network allows you to track projects by activity streams, follow people and objects as well as standard collaboration inside the enterprise.  There is no social analytics capability similar to the Radian6 offering that Salesforce offers, but I think this is just version 1 of the Oracle Social Network.

This new collaboration tool will also be available on-premise as well as in the Cloud. The Oracle Social Network also provides an iPad front-end that should be appealing for mobile workforces

Fusion Application Suite – Now Ready

Last year there was a quiet announcement of the general availability of the Oracle Fusion applications. This year was much different with Larry Ellison announcing the full suite of Oracle Fusion apps and he even did a demo of their new Fusion CRM system (BTW he did a great demo).

Oracle spent six years to completely re-write all of the PeopleSoft, Siebel, Hyperion suites of applications and now there is a new generation of Fusion applications including;

• Fusion CRM
• Fusion Financials
• Fusion Governance, Risk and Compliance
• Fusion Human Capital Management
• Fusion Procurement
• Fusion Project Portfolio Management
• Fusion Supply Chain Management
• [Photos] Fusion Apps

The interfaces look modern and don’t appear to be warmed over client/server applications. Coupled with the Oracle Social Network, these products should be quite competitive in the SaaS market. All of the Fusion applications are available either on-premise, as a managed service and as a SaaS service through the Oracle Public Cloud. There weren’t a lot of details about this hybrid architecture and like the Oracle Public Cloud and Social Network, there will probably be more details early in 2012.

Salesforce – Occupy OpenWorld

As always, there is some great theater at OpenWorld when Oracle rescheduled Marc Benioff’s keynote to Thursday morning (the day the conference ended) and he went rogue. Salesforce quickly shifted the keynote to the hotel down the street. Montclair Advisors was right at the press conference but as it turned out it was basically the same Social Enterprise keynote that was delivered at Dreamforce.

A lot of kudos goes out to the Salesforce marketing team for being able to pull off such a solid event, including streaming the keynote speech over the Internet, in less than 24 hours. Talk about business agility!

Here are some pictures from the event and a few articles with more controversy:

• [Video] Marc Benioff’s rogue Oracle OpenWorld keynote.
• [Pictures] Montclair Advisors was at the rogue Salesforce press event, got some good shots.
• A Keynote Cancelled, A Database Dropped, Lauren Carlson, Software Advice.
• Benioff, Denied OpenWorld Keynote, Mounts Podium Anyway, Charles Babock, InformationWeek.
• Oracle OpenWorld snub fails to put off Salesforce CEO, Brid-Aine Parnell The Register.

Monday October 12th

It has been several years since I went to my last Oracle User Group meeting, prior to them buying PeopleSoft, Siebel and BEA.  Here are my thoughts around the first day:

The Keynote

Charles Phillips and Safra Catz kicked things off and were helpful in shaping how Oracle is planning on not only rolling out Fusion but also how Sun will fit into their strategy.  Unlike other firms like CA or Infor who just purchase software firms and milk them for the maintenance dollars, Oracle is spending $3B a year on research and development.  They are trying to fit all of these acquired pieces together for their customers, to making them easier to install and purchase.  The analogy of buying a car piece by piece is one that is often used by firms that are looking to provide a tightly integrated ecosystem.  I am not sure if this is really what customers are interested in buying because it really creates a classic vendor ‘lock-in’ scenario.

Larry’s vision is to tightly assemble all the technology components a customer might need; horizontal and industry applications, middleware, databases, infrastructure and, after the Sun deal is approved, they can offer hardware too.  This type of vertically integrated strategy seems to work beautifully for Apple and their consumer-oriented iPhone but will this approach be as widely adopted by Global 2000 organizations with very complex requirements?

The other surprise to me was that there was no announcement of any ‘native’ Oracle Fusion applications. Many of us were hoping that there will be more news about Oracle Fusion application delivery dates, but maybe something will be announced over the next few days.  I believe that when the very smart development people at Oracle started working through the plan to rewrite JD Edwards, Siebel, PeopleSoft, Hyperion, Retek, etc…. Maybe taking a phased approach over 5-10 years might be more realistic than rewriting all the products into a new suite all at once.  That is probably why we saw all of the application ‘mash-up’ demonstrations using Fusion this morning.   This Fusion middleware mashup approach is the near term future for Oracle application customers.

This was only Day One, so stay tuned.

Here are some other general observations from Day One.

Open World Positives

• I was really impressed with the size of the event with more than 35,000 attendees, even in a recession.  The show appeared to be well organized and all of the keynote sessions that I saw were well executed and informative.  So Judy Sim, Oracle’s CMO, should be given a lot credit for her team’s efforts.

• Most of the customers that I interacted with appeared to be interested and engaged.

• The partner pavilion (trade-show) was completely filled out and appeared to be well attended.

• The Oracle Fusion middleware and Oracle Business Intelligence solutions were full featured and had  many new enhancements.  The little 5-minute demos were helpful and gave the audience a quick look at each product.

• I was pleasantly surprised to see the number of global customers and many provided public testimonials.

• I liked the tables (with power-strips) that were set up for analysts and bloggers for all of the Keynote sessions.