Holiday in Sunday

7) Will Oracle follow SAP’s in-memory approach? Appleby, noting that “SAP HANA is a simple and elegant solution” even though the entire product set is “not quite there today,” contrasts HANA’s high-value potential with what he says is a very different value proposition presented by Oracle’s newest machine: “Exalytics on the other hand is a bolt-on mixed-technology appliance. For Oracle to really compete with SAP, they need to throw out Exadata and Exalytics and build an in-memory RDBMS appliance that can do what both of those appliances do in one. They have the brains to do so – but will they? We will see.”
8) Will Oracle deliver app-integration tools to its customers, or is that a responsibility that customers should manage themselves? Says Greenbaum: “This disconnect, this dystopic vision, becomes even more ironic when you add Fusion Apps to the mix. Here’s a new suite that has to be sold in parts to customers using other, older parts of the Oracle product mix because selling it as a suite would expose its severe limitations in terms of industry-specific functionality. With integration as the starting point, you’d think Oracle would engineer the integration between Fusion Apps and the key products in the suite to be a no-brainer for the customers. Wrong. Coders, start your engines: Oracle Fusion Apps require the customer to do the majority of the integration work in order to make the products work with the rest of the Oracle stack. Sure, they are building the integration points – there are 10 or 15 available today as Fusion goes GA – but how that piecemeal approach to the core requirement of integration helps control customer costs and deliver customer value is beyond me.”
9) For the investor community, how important are Oracle’s hardware sales and hardware margins? Says Greenbaum: “Because in the end Oracle’s roll-up [of] the best of breed strategy has never been about better TCO for the customers. It’s been about optimizing the sales opportunity for Oracle’s incredibly effective sales machine, while bringing smaller, inefficient software companies under the razor-sharp cost-cutting eye of Safra Catz. There is certainly a fair amount of consideration about customer choice in the strategy as well – they have many truly best of breed apps in the portfolio – but that has increasingly fallen prey to the requirement for delivering more red meat – in the form of profit margins – to an extremely avaricious investor community hell-bent on looking out for number one. That hunt for profit margins is now all the more acute because of the strain that the Sun acquisition has put on those margins. Safra Catz is now on the record for two quarters promising that the company will soon get back to its former, pre-Sun, margin glory, with little specific guidance on when that will actually happen. Hence the real focus of Open World, which was one big, fat commercial for Exa-everything. Sure, there were plenty of keynotes about things like clouds and apps, but there was no mistaking what Larry was really selling: engineered hardware  systems. And there is no mistaking the almost frantic urgency in the subtext to that message: we won’t make good on our promise to Wall Street if the customers don’t start buying more hardware.”
10) “Where does this all lead?,” asks Greenbaum. “There are definitely apps customers who could benefit from engineered systems, but I think a more agnostic, customer-choice hardware model fits the needs of modern businesses best. Meanwhile, Oracle’s acquisition of best of breed vendors will run into a more rapidly shifting mobility-based user experience revolution that is already under way, and already making new user experiences like those in Fusion Apps look old and tired by comparison.”
Finally, because this is such an important subject, here’s a bonus question:
11) Does Oracle foster open information exchanges with influencers and customers? Says Greenbaum: “The four or so events Oracle’s competitors hold each year include multiple opportunities to put influencers in front of the execs and get the dialogue going. In doing so, most of Oracle’s competitors believe – or at least pay lip service to – the notion that they learn from the dialogue as much as the influencers. Oracle, with so much to learn, thinks otherwise….  Could this be the real purpose of Open World: listen to the story we want to tell and don’t expect us to leave time or energy for dialogue? Take the information we want to give you and to hell with the information you think you need to know?”

1 , 2
source : http://www.forbes.com/