Larry Ellison skips OpenWorld keynote to watch America's Cup

Larry Ellison had a choice on Tuesday afternoon: watch a crucial race for his America's Cup sailing team or deliver a keynote to thousands of customers and partners at Oracle OpenWorld. In the end, the Oracle CEO stayed down by the water.

Ellison cancelled his keynote at the last minute to watch Oracle Team USA in a crucial race. Both events were due to start at 2:15 p.m. Pacific time.

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Oracle chairman Jeff Henley took the stage at OpenWorld with an embarrassed half-smile. "Larry apologizes," Henley said. "Can't be in two places at once." Attendees immediately began streaming out of the massive conference hall at San Francisco's Moscone Center.

Ellison's speech was given instead by Thomas Kurian, executive vice president of product development -- who had just given a keynote on Tuesday morning and was apparently asked to revive the effort.

"The line was out the door to get in this place," said OpenWorld attendee Dan Loomis, an IT architect who asked his employer's name be withheld. "[Ellison's keynote] seems to be the highlight of the conference for a lot of people."

"My CEO would say that talking to customers and partners is a priority," he said. Ellison skipping the speech "sends the wrong message," Loomis said.

Ellison is an avid sailor whose team won the previous America's Cup, and he fought hard to bring this year's tournament to San Francisco Bay.

Few expected Oracle Team USA to still be in the contest Tuesday, but the team has made a remarkable recovery to come back against Emirates Team New Zealand.

At one point last week the Kiwis led by eight races to one. They needed one more race to clinch the trophy, while Oracle needed to win eight races in a row. But Oracle staged a comeback and was trailing by one race at the time Ellison cancelled his speech.

In fact, Oracle has won enough races to win this year's Cup, but it started the finals with a two-race deficit because it was found to have cheated in a preliminary round last year.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris' email address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com

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Larry Ellison to talk in-memory database, Oracle PaaS at OpenWorld

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison typically uses his annual OpenWorld conference keynotes to deliver the company's biggest announcements and strategic positioning, and this year they will apparently involve an in-memory database and Oracle's PaaS (platform as a service) offerings.

On Sunday, Sept. 22 Ellison will deliver his first keynote, which is titled "Oracle Database 12c In-Memory Database and M6 Big Memory Machine," according to an announcement released Tuesday.

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The first likely refers to something Ellison mentioned in June during an Oracle earnings call.

While Oracle released an initial version of Database 12c in June, on the call Ellison referred to an upcoming product he described as a "vertical, columnar compressed, high-speed in-memory vertical database" that would be out at the end of this year.

Meanwhile, M6 Big Memory Machine is apparently a high-RAM server based on Oracle's next-generation Sparc M6 chips and will likely be paired with the in-memory 12c product.

All told, Oracle and Ellison clearly plan to take the fight to SAP, Microsoft and IBM with regard to in-memory computing.

Indeed, on the June call Ellison referred to the in-memory 12c product as a reason why he was confident SAP's much-hyped HANA in-memory database "could never compete with Oracle over the long term."

While HANA has been generally available since June 2011, Oracle boasts a much larger installed base for its database platform, especially within SAP's customer base. Meanwhile, SAP has been hoping to convince customers to move their SAP workloads over to HANA. But if Oracle can get a compelling in-memory alternative to market soon, coupled with sales incentives, it could retain customers who are considering a switch.

Microsoft and IBM are also rolling out in-memory database technologies. By putting data for processing in RAM, rather than reading and writing it off of disks, in-memory databases can provide major performance boosts, vendors say.

Ellison's second OpenWorld keynote is titled "The Oracle Cloud Platform: Database as a Service. Java as a Service," and will cover Oracle's entry into PaaS.

While the services have been available for some time, Oracle hasn't spent an overt amount of energy marketing them. This clearly is about to change given that Ellison himself will broach the topic during OpenWorld, and not a lower-level Oracle executive.

Other OpenWorld keynotes will be delivered by Oracle President Mark Hurd, who is scheduled to discuss Oracle's "big data" strategy. Oracle Chief Architect Edward Screven will also speak, discussing the "Internet of Things" and machine-to-machine communication.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris' email address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com.

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