There's a new blog on the block. Just a bit of horn-tooting. Please notice. It's called In2Hyperion. It's put together by the good, smart folks at Rolta TUSC and I expect that it will reward your attention.
What's new with me? Well, I think it is inevitable that we're all going to get into big data, and big data is all going to live in the clouds. The coming battle, as I see it, is going to be the super IT folks vs the super cloud folks. It's a showdown that has been long brewing. There are going to be winners and losers, and the ultimate winners will be companies.
The super cloud folks are those old heads who have had to work with massive scalability of the sort the most successful websites have had to use. The super IT folks are those old head who have had basically to manage outsourcing, capital budgets, traditional IT, and of course big ERP and big DW. If you ask me, they are two radically different perspectives with few skillsets that overlap. Here's an example.
This week on Cranky Geeks, the cranks assembled had the nerve to suggest that Oracle bought Sun merely to destroy MySQL, and that if the world has any justice then some anti-trust agency is going to force Oracle to give it up. I really, really think that's a laughable criticism. That's because I firmly believe that Oracle wonks have absolutely zero to fear from MySQL because it doesn't scale. Now I'm just going to accept that as axiomatic, because obviously some guys somewhere have figured out how to do some masterful multi-tiering perhaps with Hadoop or some-such. And yes there is this thing stuck in my head about hearing that a lot of web folks think that a million rows in MySQL is 'very large'. So I'll admit the prejudice. But here's what I understand very clearly about Oracle, they will not kill things that refuse to die especially when there's market share at stake.
On the other hand, it's difficult for me to believe that Facebook is running on Oracle behind the scenes. These web jockeys know *something*. Which is why there is a war coming for the enterprise dollar.
My interpretation of the Oracle Sun acquisition is that Oracle is going to have its own hardware and will get into the cloud business ultimately. That will leave HP to buy SAP or vice-versa. IBM will face its greatest challenge in five to seven years. There will be other players - likely Cisco if you ask me, but the great irony is that Scott McNeely's prediction (The Network is the Computer) will finally come true, except that he won't be running the company that realizes it. Intel will probably get into the cloud data center business fabbing up custom stuff rather like whomever used to make those big switches for AT&T way back in the day. BTW, there's a great scene of a switch in THX 1138 (minute 62).
The advantage the cloud and web-guys have is that they know how to build for scale. The disadvantage is that most of their data is pretty dumb and they're not particularly interested in applying rules and discipline to it. That's the huge difference, from my way of looking at things, between corporate IT data and public web data. So the gap that needs to be filled, which may auger for a real evolution in enterprise computing is the judicious migration of critical applications to utility computing.
Imagine this. Oracle drops off a
containerized data center at your company's data center. They hook up power and network and in a short time several of your applications have been ported over. The container hooks up to a truck and off it goes to Oracle's grid. You shut down your data center and never worry about capital expense again.
Agent Smith says it is inevitable.
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