What are your impressions of Oracle Open World?

I was not there, but followed some reports (mostly not from EMC site) and I found encouraging for industry that Oracle started to preach cloud philosophy (few years ago their "Tucci" said the idea sucked or similar). For the past two years I've been wondering who will win; storage guys bringing computing power to storage arrays (data to dataland) or database appliances. At the end of the day I don't think both will survive though if they manage to stay alive long enough may both transform into same thing. If I just compare Exadata with EMC offering and possibilities one can do with given hardware, Oracle database appliance is behind and nothing on this year's OOW changed in that respect. Of course there might be something third popping up (think of virtualization product which takes care of your storage virtualization too and actually runs and manages whole DC). Rest is more pure Oracle and less interesting to me personally, but from reactions, 12c is something many DBAs were hoping Oracle will release.

I attended OOW and sat through both Larry keynotes, plus of course Joe / Jeremy. My impression is that Oracle is in danger of becoming irrelevant.

It is telling that in the late 1990's you had to be running Oracle in order to be funded by VCs as a high-tech startup, and today the opposite is the case: If you are running Oracle you cannot be funded by VCs at all. Thus, Oracle is no longer cool.

Don't get me wrong: My bread is buttered by Oracle. For a long time, I have made a good living by working with Oracle. Thus, I wish them well, and very much want to continue to work in their environment. I am simply worried that Oracle may be losing its way. (I sincerely hope this is not the case, but I have to call them as I see them.)

The worry is that Oracle may become legacy. Certainly, the current distraction that Oracle is enmeshed in is severely compromising their long-term vision: Oracle is trying to transform into a hardware company. In the process, they are annoying their installed base and making a lot of competitors out of their traditional partners (EMC included). In the process, though, the most insidious effect is that Oracle is losing their edge. Their strategic value has always been that they made great software which ran on almost everything. As Oracle goes from being open (it is Oracle OpenWorld after all) to being closed (and ExaData is certainly a closed stack if I have ever seen one), they are losing their luster as the logical, default choice for database / business data storage. And certainly, Oracle remains  more expensive than any of their competitors, which simply makes them more vulnerable.

The depressing fact is that Oracle has nowhere to go but down: They are the market leader while being the most expensive alternative in their space in the vast majority of usage cases. While this is an amazing accomplishment, it is not sustainable. Eventually folks will come up with a viable alternative to Oracle for primary business data storage. In fact, that is happening already.

My hope is that Oracle will once again show their resiliency and retransform their business. I have to be realistic though: The direction that Oracle is apparently headed down is not good for their long term prospects, at least in my view. Comments anyone?

Are they really trying to transfrom to HW company?  Well, they should   You need muscles (hardware) to be less dependent in collaboration with others (eg EMC). Having database appliance is next logical step for database vendor. And since they took Sun under their own, taking advantage of ZFS and other things can be helpful. I agree that it takes different kind of vision to steer the whole company in such case, but right now they are doing just fine if you judge this by the numbers.

I do not come from DBA perspective to Oracle so my view is different, but I stopped trusting Oracle after their move with HP. To me, that speaks enough about the company and their relationship towards end users. I was hoping that during the time they would become with a deal where suddenly they are best friends, but that never happened and I believe IBM got the huge benefit out it (at least from my point of view and from what I have seen at few sites).