Global CIO: Oracle's Fowler Says Systems Performance About To Explode

InformationWeek -- Oracle executive vice president of systems John Fowler clearly revels in the significant new investments Larry Ellison is pumping into every facet of Fowler's organization: the hiring each day of more engineers, the expansion in scale and funding for chip development, the creation of advanced systems running thousands of threads and handling hundreds of terabytes of memory, and imagining what the "refactored" storage and server systems of the future will look like.

But what really animates the already-mercurial Fowler are his ideas for how all that geeky, inside-the-labs stuff can be expressed in business environments to unleash for clients opportunities wring unprecedented customer and marketplace insights out of the mountains of data and information that they're accumulating today faster than they know how to manage it.

"On our server systems, now that we're with Oracle, we plan on at least doubling performance every two years," Fowler said in a recent interview on the former Sun campus about 20 minutes from Oracle headquarters. "That's pretty aggressive, but actually, that's not really the exciting part because what's really happening in most enterprises is that what people would like to do is to operate on, say, 10 times the information they have today. So whether it's consumer analytics, or collecting smart-meter data in the utilities thing, or becoming very much better at seismic and oil exploration, or to properly handle national health-record systems.

"There's just an endless number of examples where if you can take a richer data in-feed, and you have a set of data models behind it that let you look at all that in five or six or 10 different ways instead of in just one way, you can accelerate your business. I don't care if you're in transportation, if you're in banking, manufacturing, the military, telephony—all of those areas really benefit if they can enrich the data and speed up the access to that data and thereby gain great advantage. To me, that's the most exciting aspect of infrastructure development today."

Oh yes—and it all has to be done in real time. Read more >>

Global CIO: Larry Ellison And The New Oracle Rock The Tech World

InformationWeek -- If you think Larry Ellison and Oracle are developing complex and byzantine schemes to turn the computer industry upside down, consider the reaction of Oracle executive VP John Fowler upon meeting Ellison and coming aboard as the highest-ranking former Sun executive.

"I didn't know Larry before the acquisition except by reputation," Fowler says, "so, like most executives in this situation, I spent a little time familiarizing myself with my key financial numbers so I could try to seem particularly intelligent when we met.

"But in the very first discussion Larry had with me, he wanted to know the cache sizes of all my processors. He wanted to talk about clock rates and cache sizes!" Fowler says with a laugh. "And every single meeting with Larry since then has been identical on these broad topics: How do you make the products better, where do we need to be investing more, how do we make all the products work better together, and how do we deliver them better for customers?

"And so it's actually kind of a simple place in that regard -- and it all flows from Larry." Read more >>

10 of the Top Data Breaches of the Decade

ABC News (from June 14th) -- The Internet cried foul last week when news broke that an AT&T security breach exposed the e-mail addresses of at least 100,000 owners of Apple's iPad 3G.

But industry observers are quick to point out that this is hardly the first -- and hardly the worst -- data breach that the tech world has ever seen.

"The fact is 114,000 is an impressive number and they're e-mail addresses. ... [But] that's almost public information," said Dan Tynan, a technology reporter and co-author of the technology humor site eSarcasm.

Some companies publish relevant e-mail addresses on their sites, and even when companies don't outright reveal addresses, it's often easy to guess them, he said.

"What these guys did was something that spammers do every single day," he said.

While it's discomforting when any personal information is compromised, Tynan said that this breach didn't expose seriously valuable information, such as social security numbers, bank account numbers or medical records.

But other security breaches over the past decade have disclosed the kind of information that could potentially threaten the people behind the data. Read more >>

Global CIO: Oracle Reveals Strategy And Customers For White-Hot Exadata

InformationWeek -- Oracle's 22-month-old Exadata Database Machine has leapfrogged the data-warehousing market and become a major player in high-end OLTP environments, and is now being positioned as a core database-consolidation platform due to its unprecedented capacity and throughput.

After rejuvenating its data-warehousing business and giving the company a foothold in the high-end OLTP systems market, Oracle's white-hot Exadata Database Machine is now also being positioned as a core database-consolidation platform that can handle all of the above for CIOs while delivering faster, cheaper, and better results.

In Oracle's first detailed public discussion of its Exadata strategy and market dynamics, senior vice president of database and server technologies Andrew Mendelsohn identified 15 global customers using the product and said Exadata Version 2 is rapidly becoming the foundation technology for banks and other large enterprises looking to build what he called "virtual private clouds."

Mendelsohn said that Exadata's unique combinations of optimized software and networking along with mostly commodity hardware allow it to handle a range of high-end tasks that competitors' systems can't match, making Exadata a more-attractive alternative for CIOs looking to harness greater performance at lower cost while also simplifying their maddeningly complex environments.

The system's blend of flash memory chips with hard-drive memory, he said, allows it to address not only the sequential I/O scanning requirements for data warehousing but also the random I/O needs for OLTP, which creates a vast difference between the value offered by Exadata V2 and that offered by single-function data-warehousing appliances from Teradata, Netezza, and more recently the EMC-Greenplum pairing. Read more >>

Real Application Testing: A Business Case

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Introducing Oracle Business Intelligence 11g

Oracle.com -- Discover Why Oracle’s Business Intelligence Technology Is The Best-in-Class BI Solution



Event Details:

Tuesday, July 20, 2010
12:00 noon – 6:00 p.m.
Frederick P. Rose Hall, Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center
33 West 60th Street at Broadway
New York, NY 10023
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Join Charles Phillips, President, and Paul Rodwick, Vice President, Product Management, for the introduction of the latest release of Oracle’s business intelligence software.

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