Is Oracle 11g not yet as successful as we may have been led to believe?

According to Pythian Group CEO Paul Vallee, the answer is yes. Vallee claims his research shows that Oracle 11g is being adopted at slower rates than earlier Oracle databases - and Oracle Corp. will neither comment nor provide numbers showing otherwise.

Pythian Group is an enterprise database management service that manages 718 production databases for 56 Oracle customers. Vallee says that only 3 out of the 718 databases are running 11g (which was released last July).

As I wrote last month, IDC reported that Oracle has increased its database market share. IDC analyst Carl Olofson said Oracle told him that 10% of users expressed intent to upgrade to 11g. According to Olofson, “that would be an unusually high adoption rate for the first year.”

In the Network World article, Vallee says that, based on his numbers from Pythian, “he can say with 95% confidence that no more than 3.66% of Oracle databases are running 11g. With 50% confidence, he says it’s unlikely that even 1% use 11g.” Vallee calls Pythian “a robust sample” of Oracle customers, sufficient for use in statistical studies. 

Vallee acknowledged that it might be unrealistic for Oracle to know exactly how many customers are using 11g, but the number of support requests they receive for help with 11g would be a good indication.

However, Oracle declined a request by Network World to provide any support numbers. They also declined to comment on Vallee’s claims, “instead providing links to a few documents, none of which show how many Oracle customers have adopted 11g.”

There’s nothing unusual about a slow adoption rate for a new release - so why would Oracle be reluctant to admit one? (If Vallee’s findings are valid).  And, while it may be true that “organizations worldwide adopt Oracle 11g,” just how many organizations is it,  

I recently wrote about a post by Infoworld blogger Sean McCown, who argued that the real difference between Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle is the accessible community that Microsoft has built for its users.

But would a newly released tool from the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) change McCown’s mind about a supposed lack of community resources for Oracle users?

On April 16, OAUG announced the launch of its Knowledge Factory– “a centralized, dynamic platform for user-submitted content that provides a comprehensive knowledge-sharing resource for the organization’s members,” according to the press release.

The web-based forum is completely community-driven and allows its members to discuss and exchange advice on Oracle-related topics, search a library of articles and submit their own articles, as well. Some of the Knowledge Factory’s other features include a blog and discussion area, enhanced member profiles and an OAUG Conference Paper Database.

We have a similar community-driven forum here at TechTarget called the IT Knowledge Exchange (ITKE). It’s a place where you and your peers can ask and answer questions, get advice and read blogs written by other industry experts. You can also browse information by topic; for example, check out the Oracle-related tags found here.

Where do you go for Oracle information and advice from peers? (If you go anywhere at all?) Do you find community-driven environments like the OAUG’s Knowledge Factory useful? And, if you have used this forum already, what have your experiences been like?

Oracle may not be done yet.

In his opening keynote address at Collaborate ‘08 here in Denver, Oracle president Charles Phillips outlined Oracle’s strategy to dominate the database, middleware and applications markets.

The database market seems to be well in hand. To applause from the audience, Phillips cited recent Gartner figures that said last year was the first time Oracle had more database market share than IBM and Microsoft combined.

“If you’re an Oracle database customer, you can rest easy,” Phillips said.

Not that there was much chance of Oracle’s database business folding. Nonetheless the 7,000 members of Oracle’s three major user groups, the Independent Oracle User Group, the Oracle Applications User Group and Quest, still like to hear that their vendor is staying aggressive.

Oracle needs the user groups to help keep people informed, Phillips told the audience. No small task considering there are now 6,000 products at Oracle and more companies are joining the fold every day, willingly or unwillingly, a point Phillips joked about in his address.

“There’s a new person almost every day at Oracle because of the acquisitions,” he said. “So if you’re not a customer yet, we’ll get you sooner or later.”

That’s what happened with BEA. Five years ago, Oracle decided to enter the middleware market, perfect timing given the emergence of the Internet and industry integration standards.

“Now we’re over $1 billion in revenue [in middleware],” he said. “We surpassed BEA and now we get to buy them. That’s the way it works.”

The moment also presented Phillips with an opportunity to brag about Oracle’s application integration architecture (AIA) strategy announced last year at the show. AIA provides packaged, SOA technology, built on standards-based middleware, to integrate Oracle applications. Initial packages focused on some of the most common integrations, like order to cash integrations between Siebel and Oracle E-Business Suite. More packaged integrations will be released later this year.

An Oracle address can’t go by without a swipe at SAP — and AIA provided Phillips the perfect opportunity.

“If we don’t have [the integration] you want, you can take the platform yourself and build it,” he said. “That includes legacy applications and the mother of all legacy applications, of course, is SAP. In the course of all these acquisitions, [companies] are finding they’re Oracle applications shops now, they’re just using SAP for general ledger.”

Future development, Phillips said, will focus on marrying Web 2.0 features into both Oracle’s enterprise and industry-specific applications.

“You look at off-the-shelf applications and off-the-shelf is only about a third of what you do every day,” he said. “We hadn’t been addressing these industries.”

Finally, in the one bit of news released yesterday, Phillips announced Oracle is extending Premium Support for Oracle E-Business Suite 11.5.10 another year later than planned, to November 2010.

“When we said we were going to end support, we heard you’re not quite ready to upgrade,” he said. “Based on the input you’re giving us we do listen, we do react.”

Oracle DBAs:  To what do you attribute problems with Oracle security?

a.) poorly designed software
b.) failure to apply  patches and maintain software
c.) lack of financial resources
d.) all of the above

This question has recently made a small stir in the blogosphere, and not everyone can agree on an answer.

Bex Huff, in his “technology, lifehacks, and all that good stuff” blog, says: “Unlike James McGovern, I don’t believe security problems are entirely due to bad software or clueless developers… I’d argue most security problems are due to improperly configured and improperly maintained software. However, I also believe that blaming the implementation team is a cop-out. Instead, developers need to realize that security is a process, not a product.”

Huff goes on to highlight what he sees as the critical process of Oracle security: applying patches. He doesn’t seem to understand why fewer than 20% of Oracle customers apply their rolling security patches.

In his blog “Enterprise Architecture: from Incite comes Insight,” James McGovern says he has the answer: Applying patches is costly. And, he says, it’s not all the fault of the user: “Can we acknowledge that the patch existed because the base software wasn’t written with security in mind in the first place?”

In McGovern’s later blog post, “If software vendors really cared about security,” he outlines some questions for enterprise companies to ask vendors before purchasing software. For example: what features does the product have that helps ensure it’s designed securely?

So, yes, the best and most practical answer is probably “d.” But do you see any of these factors as having more of an impact? Do you think either Huff or McGovern has a better understanding of the issue?

Salesforce.com chairman and CEO Marc Benioff spent 13 years at Oracle Corp., before leaving the corporation and founding the CRM powerhouse Salesforce.com in 1999. Since then, Salesforce.com has enjoyed much success, including a reported 85% annualized sales growth over the last five years.

So why would Benioff want to return to the company that helped launch his career?

According to Tom Foremski (the same blogger who started the Salesforce.com acquisition rumor), it makes perfect sense for Benioff to do so, and succeed the “very close to retirement” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison when the time comes.

Foremski says that Salesforce.com could grow faster by acquiring Oracle, and that Benioff has the same hard-hitting attitude as Ellison. And, since Ellison is 63, shouldn’t he announce a successor soon?

But there’s one thing we have to remember — this is Larry Ellison we’re talking about.

Take a look at an August 2006 article from Forbes, “The extraordinary life of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.”  Even Ellison’s top two aides admit they could never succeed him, if anyone will ever succeed him at all. ( Safra Catz says: “I don’t want the job,” ; Charles Phillips says: “Larry will be here forever. We don’t discuss succession. That’s not my job.”).  

Board Chairman Jeffrey Henley, whose job it actually is, agrees: “There is no successor to Larry, no heir apparent…We discuss the subject, but there is no perfect plan. Larry still wants total control.”

Continue reading, and you’ll see that one person does have a prediction — Benioff, who might even be hinting that he could one day be in the running for Larry’s unobtainable position.

‘”Larry’s personality mandates that he’s in charge, so he can’t have a successor,” says Benioff, who founded Salesforce.com with a $2 million investment from Ellison that today is a 4% personal stake worth $100 million. “But one day he’ll have a revelation, look outside for talent — and it will likely be a former Oracle executive.”‘

How long can Ellison and his staff actually avoid the subject of succession? It should be interesting to see.

InfoWorld blogger Sean McCown recently had his say in the Oracle vs. Microsoft SQL Server debate — and some Oracle users aren’t too happy about it.

In “The real difference between SQL Server and Oracle,” McCown writes that what most sets Microsoft apart from Oracle is the community that Microsoft has built, and the ease at which the members of this community can get the information they need.

“If you take any 10 DBAs from each side and ask them to look up a solution to a probem on their platform, the SQL guys will find the answer much faster than the Oracle guys will. And that’s just a fact. If you’re looking on specifics on how Oracle works internally, it’s almost impossible to ferret out the info, but with SQL, there are so many open resources it’s just a matter of a few minutes to [find] an answer.”

Oracle, on the other hand, is doing business the old way, and “is still living in the old days where everything is a good ole boys club,” he says. This makes it difficult for Oracle users to get sufficient direction and training.

McCowan received mixed feedback, but many Oracle users disagreed with him and defended the Oracle community. Here’s some of McCowan’s response:

“I never said there were NO forums or documentation. I said that it’s really difficult to find anything when you need it…. So the question stands: How does the Oracle community go about advertising its resources?”

From your own experiences, what do you think? How could Oracle make its resources more accessible for its customers? Or, do you think Oracle actually wins out over Microsoft? (In McCown’s words, “you’re just crazy”?)

It’s no secret that Larry Ellison thinks acquisitions are a great way of growing his company. But does this make Oracle any less innovative or authentic?  

According to Ellison in this New York Times article last week, many people in Silicon Valley think just that. Ellison hopes Oracle’s series of billion-dollar acquisitions — starting with his $10.3 billion bid for PeopleSoft in 2004 — have begun to change how the industry views consolidations.

“It’s bizarre that there’s a stigma to buying something rather than building it yourself,” he tells the NYT’s Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Sorkin says that Ellison has not only made “hostile deals” acceptable, but has proven they can work. Ellison agrees: “They are copying us. Others would be foolish not to try.”

If this is true, then Ellison’s latest “copycat” is Microsoft, whose $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo was rejected last month. But what’s surprising, in this case, is that Ellison suggests he’s actually rooting for longtime rival Microsoft. Tech blogger Kara Swisher also questions what’s making Ellison root for his nemesis. 

Do you think Oracle’s (or any other company’s) acquisition history downplays its innovation? Would users be better off if Oracle built everything itself? Some of it?

The results are in from Evans Data Corp.’s first survey on database user preferences — and Oracle has made a clean sweep.

Oracle (version 10g or later) ranked number one in all 13 categories of the survey, which polled over 1,400 database users in December 2007.  According to Evans Data., a market research firm, most of those polled were users of several database systems. They were asked about their satisfaction with the following:

• Performance
• Security features
• Scalability
• Atomicity
• Consistency
• Isolation of transactions
• Durability of transactions
• Quality of data modeling tools
• Support for XML
• Multi platform support
• Quality of management tools included in the database
• Quality of available 3rd party management tools
• Programming language support

The closest Oracle came to any of its competitors (which included My SQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM DB2, among others) was a tie with IBM in one category.

In this InformationWeek article, Evans Data CEO John Andrews is quoted as saying: “The most glaring item that we took away from this research is that in 23 years we’ve never had one vendor come out number one in all categories.”

So, what do you think? Are you running multiple databases and surprised by these results? Which category’s win surprises you the most? Let us know your thoughts.

Collaborate ‘08 is fast approaching, and Oracle Enterprise Content Management (ECM) users can look forward to several ECM sessions, including Collaborate’s ‘Conference Within a Conference’ that will focus specifically on Oracle’s content management past, present and future.

All and all, there will be over 30 sessions on a variety of ECM topics, including: “Exciting New Features of Universal Content Management,” “50 Ways to Integrate with Universal Content Management,” and “Oracle Content Management Roadmap.”

This announcement also comes as Oracle’s Universal Content Management system was given the 2008 Technology of the Year Award by Infoworld. It looks like Oracle’s ECM acquisitions — such as Stellent and last month’s announced acquisition of Captovation – are proving to be very worthwhile.

There’s always room for improvement, though, especially if you ask SAP, which has been circulating a new press release saying that SAP is taking Hyperion ECM customers away from Oracle. It even names some of those customers. Longtime industry analyst and blogger Josh Greenbaum had some very interesting things to say about SAP’s claims, by the way. 

What features would you like to see added (or dropped) in Oracle’s content management products? And if you had to choose between Oracle and SAP ECM, who would you pick and why? Let us know.

After nearly eight trips around the Sun, covering just about every technological topic from ABAP to zSeries, it’s my last week at TechTarget and SearchOracle.com. And as my time here comes to an end, I find myself thinking of the tremendous amount of help that IT professionals like you have given me over the years.

I started at TechTarget during the height of the dot com bubble — a time when a rash of ill-conceived and ultimately doomed Internet companies let stock options fly like wedding rice while encouraging employees to wear roller skates to work. Back then, I didn’t even really know what an operating system was, and I thought the Love Bug worm was something you cured with penicillin.

Then the bubble burst and, at first, I feared my newfound career in technology journalism would meet an untimely end. But TechTarget survived the fallout and actually continued to grow at a rapid pace. It soon became clear that my new career would continue — if I could manage to learn more about the world of IT. And that’s where you came in.

From the Oracle DBAs in the trenches who taught me the meaning of ‘SQL Query,’ to the CIOs in the corner offices who schooled me on the necessity of ROI, you were always there, always patient and always willing to help, even if it meant answering embarrassingly basic questions like: Could you explain that to me again like I’m a three-year-old?  
 
For all your help, I just wanted to say thanks. I leave this job knowing that the Oracle user community and larger IT marketplace is filled with unbelievably intelligent people — people who taught me a great deal.   

Remember, SearchOracle.com will remain the number one stop on the Internet for Oracle professionals long after I’m gone. For now, however, please send those Oracle-related tips, comments, story ideas and feedback to news director Barney Beal.

As for me, I’ll be trading in my pen for a meat slicer and an apron. Hopefully my new customers will be as supportive as you’ve been. But somehow I doubt that’s possible.

Take care of yourselves.

– Mark