HP vs Oracle Round 3

Round 1: August 6th 2010 - HP Fires Mark Hurd for fiscal improprieties. Larry Ellison calls this "the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago."

Round 2: September 6th 2010 - Oracle hires ousted HP Chief Mark Hurd. HP responds with a law suit that "in the course of his duties with Oracle, Hurd will inevitably disclose HP's trade secrets and confidential information."

Round 3. October 1st 2010 - The Silicon Valley Soap Opera took another bizarre turn with the appointment of Leo Apotheker as the new HP CEO. Larry Ellison says publicly that he is "speechless" that HP "picked a guy who was recently fired because he did such a bad job running SAP."

Will somebody please stand up and tell Larry Ellison that *he* hired a guy who was recently fired from HP because he did not stand up to HP's ethical standards (which are also the standards normally practiced by the rest of us). Who is "speechless" now?

HP really hit it where it hurds the most (sorry, could not resist that!) with the appointment of Ray Lane as the non-executive chairman. Ray Lane has a storied history with Larry Ellison. It will be interesting to see who makes the next move.

I was disappointed with Chris O'Brien's piece in the Mercury News earlier today. He starts off very well building the case for why the other stories (Apple vs Adobe and Google vs Apple) pale in comparison to this one. It was his conclusion on "How can this get better?" that was disappointing. Chris O'Brien opted to take the trite path to possible conclusions.

I think the battlefield is now the marketplace. HP and Oracle are going after the same customers in the Enterprise Data Center. Oracle had the upper hand with Enterprise Software. HP closed that gap with the hiring of Leo Apotheker. With HP's recent acquisitions of 3Par, ArcSight and Fortify they are filling critical holes. I believe that they have the right person at the helm to lead them. I applaud HPs Board in having the courage to hire a rank outsider to help them effectively combat Oracle - an advantage that an insider would not have given them.

We are nearing the end of the first quarter and, by my score, HP is leading by a field goal - with each team having scored a touchdown. We have three more quarters left in the game. The Bay Area is already abuzz with all the activity that has happened so far. Hold on to your seat belts folks. The game has just begun!

Oracle Open World

I was at the GlassFish Community Event at Oracle Open World earlier this evening. The theme for Oracle Open World Conference this year is "Hardware and Software. Engineered to Work Together". The entire block of Howard Street was blocked off by a huge tent for the event. A Half Pipe with the "Future of Java" is the first sight that greets you as you make the left turn into Howard Street from 4th Street.

Other than this blue, the area was swathed in a sea of Oracle Red. I have been attending JavaOne conferences at Moscone for the last 15 years. I have not seen the area transformed in this fashion.

As you enter the Moscone Convention Center, the first thing you see is the America's Cup trophy - with two guards stationed to ensure that it stays there! The crowds were quite huge. I was not surprised when Judith Sim (Oracle CMO) announced that there were 41,000 people in attendance. The Opening keynote of the conference was delivered by HP Exec VP Ann Livermore. I am not sure if I was the only uncomfortable person in the room when she was introduced. Here are two companies that are bitterly feuding out in the open. Her introduction might as well have been , "HP paid mucho bucks to sponsor this conference. There was no backing off their keynote slot. So here is Ann Livermore." Ms. Livermore made the mistake of asking the audience how many people used Oracle solutions on HP hardware. About a dozen people raised their hands. Usually, when the audience is asked a question, the lights go brighter and the camera is turned towards the audience. Luckily (for HP) the logistics folks at Moscone realized the disastrous response and quickly dimmed the lights. Ms. Livermore recovered glibly and unconvincingly said, "Good. That is a sizable number". The rest of her talk focused on the HP panoply of solutions.

The lowlight of the evening was Larry Ellison's keynote. Perhaps my expectations were too high. I had gone there to hear an industry visionary provide a state-of-the-industry, an Oracle-State-of-the-Union, where-is-technology-headed, state-of-feud-with-HP. Instead, we got a dull, boring, sales pitch on Oracle's new Exalogic Cloud server. I was curious to check if it was just me who was uninspired. Just about everyone I checked with afterwards gave a resounding, unequivocal thumbs down. In my opinion, here are the mistakes Mr. Ellison did:

• Beating up Salesforce.com and Marc Benioff openly. Also, Mr. Ellison made some simplistic assumptions on Salesforce.com and started bashing this mythical entity.
• Insulting the IQ of his audience by repeating just about everything he said not once, not twice, but at least three times. We got it the first time you said it, Mr. Ellison.
• At one point in his drone, Mr. Ellison said, "They asked me not to add this information." "They" suggested that for a good reason, Larry. By putting it up and reading it out loud (as if by rote), you did not help yourself.

At around 8:00 pm (the keynote was already 15 minutes past the scheduled end time), I could not take it anymore and walked out. I looked back and most of the seats were empty ...

Oh! and as I was explaining what Micello does to a few folks at the conference, the unanimous response was, "I could totally have used that at this conference". Especially this year, where JavaOne, Oracle Open World and Oracle Develop are all combined into a single event!