Now that the dust is settling, however, the strategy and intentions behind the RightNow acquisition are finally coming into focus.

Customer service has historically been a weak point for Oracle. “Customer service isn’t the strongest suit for Oracle,” said Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research.

Oracle does have strong call center technology in Oracle Contact On Demand, however. Was the intent behind this merger providing Oracle with the cloud framework it needed to challenge long-time rival Salesforce.com in the areas of customer experience management and multi-tenancy? Is Oracle looking to compete with other firms in the realm of customer experience

RightNow is known for providing customer-centric service, including utilizing social networking, live chat service and guided assistance. In the last few years, Oracle has purchased multiple firms for the sole purpose of gaining the rights to that organization’s particular product. For example, in June of last year, they purchased FatWire for access to their content management systems; Pillar Data Systems in order to have a strong storage foundation that July; and Datanomic that same month in order to have a base in data quality. RightNow fits right in as a part of their pattern of purchasing an entire firm in order to move into a market or compete in a new area.

Does Larry Ellison see RightNow as the key to doing battle with Salesforce?

Almost certainly. Forrester analyst Dianne Clarkson was quoted as saying, “RightNow has a lot to offer Oracle. Along with salesforce.com, we called out RightNow as a SaaS solution that was faster to deploy and easier to change than traditional on-premise offerings. RightNow is well positioned to give Oracle a customer service offering for the mid-market.”

It will be interesting to watch how this situation continues to unfold. Stay tuned…

According to Reuters, McDermott told a German newspaper that the possibility exists.

“The question is whether Oracle can imagine it,” he said.

McDermott’s comment about “whether Oracle can imagine” the possibility of running Oracle applications on SAP HANA seems a bit ridiculous. Oracle applications already run on competing appliances such as Teradata and IBM Netezza. Also, SAP applications run on Oracle Exadata. It seems a strong possibility that Oracle would be open to the idea of Oracle applications running on SAP HANA.

SAP HANA could give Oracle shops another choice when it comes to appliances. HANA lines up against Oracle’s own in-memory appliance, Exalytics, as well as lining up indirectly against the Oracle Exadata database machine. In a recent SearchOracle.com survey, about 6% of Oracle shops said they would consider SAP HANA as an alternative to Exadata. That isn’t a lot, but it’s important to remember that SAP HANA just came out at the end of 2010.

According to a Wall Street Journal blurbon the press conference, Snabe said that SAP is “ready to go for leadership in two new categories; namely the database business and the cloud business.”

The database business is one in which Oracle owns almost 50% of the market share. SAP, at about 2%, is barely a blip on the screen. And yet no one should be that surprised by Snabe’s comments. SAP is lining up its in-memory High-Performance Analytic Appliance (HANA) against appliances from Oracle such as Exadata and Exalytics. SAP has been pushing the in-memory database message for a while now, and is placing a bet that more companies will move toward in-memory for better performance.

Can SAP become a leader in databases? It is certainly possible, and not without precedent. IT companies rise and fall, and sometimes it happens quickly. I remember a few years back when Sun Microsystems started getting into the x86 server space. The company quickly built up its share competing against the likes of big boys IBM, HP and Dell. Then as Oracle acquired Sun, the company’s share in the x86 server market is going down just as rapidly, as Oracle is uninterested in selling low-margin x86 hardware. So certainly these are grand proclamations by SAP, but still worth keeping an eye on.

Oracle MySQL will receive the most fixes with 27, while Oracle Sun products will have the highest security vulnerabilities. The patch will be for the following products:

• 27 for MySQL
• 17 for Sun products
• 11 for Fusion Middleware
• Eight for JD Edwards
• Six for PeopleSoft
• Three for E-Business Suite
• Three for Oracle’s virtualization software
• Two for Oracle Database
• One for Oracle’s supply chain software

The remaining security patch releases for 2012 are expected on April 17, July 17 and October 16.

As Chris Kanaracus from the IDG News Service noted, the price list change suggests that an announcement for general availability of Exalytics should be coming soon. According to the price list, the Exalytics hardware costs $135,000. That includes a single 3U Oracle-Sun server with four 10-core Intel Xeon processors and 1 TB of memory. Support and licensing for it runs another approximately $30,000 per year.

But then we get into software pricing for the machine. The TimesTen software is $366 per user for named-user plus ($300 for licensing, $66 for support) or about $42,000 per processor. There’s more. According to the price list notes, Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite is required for Exalytics, with the number of licenses matching that for TimesTen. According to a different Oracle price list, BI Foundation Suite is about $4,500 per user or about $550,000 per processor. Yeah. It adds up quickly.

That said, this is all list price. Customers can often negotiate 70% discounts or even steeper.

The numbers show that many Oracle (and SAP) end users are trying to get more life out of their software than Oracle and SAP often want. They also show that there are plenty of IT pros out there who have come around to considering and using third-party support, something that really wasn’t considered just a short time ago. Rimini supports Oracle Database and a host of Oracle applications such as E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards and Siebel.

In general, more Oracle end users are considering third-party support providers. In a 2010 survey, 32% of SearchOracle.com readers said they always consider third-party support. That number jumped to 41% in 2011.

According to the numbers, Rimini Street had about $33 million in revenues last year. Now let’s be honest: That is an absolute drop in the bucket compared to Oracle’s overall revenues, and even compared to Oracle’s support revenues. Just to give you an idea, Oracle’s licensing and support revenues last year was close to $16 billion. That’s with a B, compared to $33 million with an M. And if you talk to Rimini executives, they’ll say as much. For them, it just means they still have plenty of room to continue growing.

And if you think Oracle isn’t noticing companies like Rimini, you would be wrong. Oracle is spending a lot of money to sue Rimini Street, claiming Rimini has stolen Oracle software and support materials through Rimini’s clients. Rimini is denying the charges, of course. The lawsuit was initially filed in 2010. There are more hearings set on the case this year.

Exaportfolio and other hardware

First is Oracle’s additions and updates to what I’m calling its Exaportfolio. Exadata, Exalogic, and now, Exalytics. Exalytics is built for business intelligence, and has the TimesTen in-memory database built into it along with Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite. It is yet another attempt by Oracle to sell its integrated appliances. It also previewed its Big Data Appliance meant to run Hadoop and Oracle’s new NoSQL Database Enterprise Edition inside. Are you thinking of buying up one of these integrated appliances?
Read our Exadata and Exalogicserver guides, and check out why Exalytics might be a better comparison to SAP HANA than any previous Oracle appliance.

And don’t forget about the other hardware announcements Oracle made this year: the Sparc SuperCluster and the Oracle Database Appliance.

Fusion Applications

The year 2011 was yet another year for Oracle Fusion Applications. For most it meant another year of waiting for Fusion to come to fruition. But there were some stories that trickled out of actual companies using Fusion Applications in production through Oracle’s early adoption program. Principal Financial Group was the first, as Oracle started telling its story earlier in the year, and then Principal expounded on it later, when Oracle Fusion Applications became generally availableat Openworld. In other case, Patrick Gresham, the enterprise applications manager for a fast food chain, detailed how his company decided to move to Fusion. Finally, at Openworld some Fusion CRM early adopters told their stories.

That said, there are still many concerns around whether most customers are ready to adopt Fusion.

Oracle Support

Customer and technical support is a challenge when dealing with most vendors, but it appears to be even more acute when it comes to Oracle. Earlier in 2011 we published a story questioning whether the phrase Oracle Support is an oxymoron. Readers came back at us with a flurry of comments, most of them negative. Experts at a local Oracle users group meetinglater in the year echoed readers’ feelings. At Oracle Openworld, we scored an interview with Oracle President Mark Hurd, where we asked him about it. His response? That support is critical to Oracle.

Oracle reaches for the cloud

At Oracle Openworld, the company announced Oracle Public Cloud. Initially the Oracle Public Cloud will include two Fusion Applications, CRM and Human Capital Management. In the future it is also projected to include a social network and Oracle Database, among other things. Needless to say many experts said Oracle was a bit late to the game, what with Amazon and Salesforce.com among others having already dived headfirst into the cloud. There were also stories of Oracle customers dipping their toes into cloud computing. AT&T is eyeing hybrid cloud computing, for example. And Floyd Teter, a well-known name in the Oracle applications universe, said that Fusion Apps being available in the cloud is a big deal.

Oracle is still also trying to push Exalogic as a “cloud in a box,” and consultant Eric Guyer scrutinized that claim. Other Oracle experts opined in August on Oracle’s place in the cloud, before the Public Cloud announcement.

Watch out for Oracle license audits

Another story published by SearchOracle.com in 2011 that gained some headway was our two-part series on Oracle licensing audits. The first warned the reader about audits, outlining how they usually come about and the reasons behind them. The second went into further depth about an Oracle license audit - what happens during them and how end users can avoid license auditing traps. The stories led to editor Mark Fontecchio being invited to present during a Miro Consulting webinar on license auditing.

Oracle becomes OpenSource - maybe Santa has the power to deliver…
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1. Oracle 11g XE for 64-bit Windows!
2. Give me back the “old” Java-based “Enterprise Console Manager.”
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Exadata !!!
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APEX for my Oracle DB reporting.
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Schema-level privileges.  Come on, it’s been decades.
Also how about: Alter username rename to new_username.
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Ironically, I do not have a Christmas wish list for Oracle this year.  While a bit on the pricey side, I must say that the Oracle relational database software, which is what we primarily use and are running Oracle11g Release 2 on Linux and Solaris, has been very stable, scalable, and performs reasonably well.  I am pleased with Oracle’s quarterly critical patch update schedule and process, and have come to depend on Oracle as the workhorse database engine alongside SQL Server 2008 R2 and MySQL.  So I guess my only wish is that Oracle continue to advance and improve the relational database product line and doesn’t break anything in the process.

This is a world of expectations, and according to financial analysts, Oracle missed them all over the place. While software revenue was up almost 7% in the last quarter, hardware revenue dive-bombed 14%. Of course Oracle execs had their reason ready: According to them, the transition from Sparc T3 to T4 delayed orders by some customers. Wait, I thought the focus of Oracle hardware was its Exaportfolio, ie. Exadata, Exalogic, and Exalytics? Right? Suddenly a Sparc chip transition causes this much of a hiccup? OK…

On the expenses side, it is interesting to note that Oracle increased its sales and marketing budget by almost 11% compared to the same quarter last year. Oracle President Mark Hurd made a point of it, saying that Oracle has put “1,700 incremental sales resources into the field” since the beginning of the company’s fiscal year, which started in September.

Hurd added that Oracle has shown “strong expense discipline” while adding sales staff. Yep, that sounds about right. Hardware products and support expenses dropped 10% and 28%, respectively. Software licensing and product support expenses were also down 3% year over year. In other words, Oracle sales and marketing has been trending up since early 2010, while investment in Oracle products and support has been trending down.

What does this mean? Well, many Oracle customers complain that once they become Oracle customers, Oracle tends to forget about them. Hurd denied this in an interview at Oracle OpenWorld earlier this year. But the company’s SEC filings paint a picture of a company with a boosted sales staff and declining product and support budgets.

Weblogic is the second “c” product Oracle has released this year - earlier it announced Enterprise Manager 12c. Needless to say, after years of CEO Larry Ellison making fun of the word “cloud,” Oracle has now embraced it, or at least the first letter anyway. It is expected to be available for download next Thursday. Needless to say, here are the main takeaways as I saw them:

• Oracle Weblogic 12c is meant as an application server for multiple platforms - conventional servers, Oracle appliances like Exalogic, and in the cloud.
• Weblogic 12c is certified for Java Enterprise Edition (EE) 6.
• It is meant as a piece of what Oracle is calling its Cloud Application Foundation (picture below).

Now, for some reactions. Simon Haslam, an Oracle ACE director and chair of the U.K. Oracle Users Group special interest group on middleware, noted that the zip installer for developers has been “slimmed down,” making it easier for download.

Haslam mentioned that an announcement that came with Weblogic 12c was Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder, which will allow Oracle pros to “design and deploy pre-defined collections of ready installed Virtual Machines into different environments (not unlike VMware vCenter Orchestrator).” Haslam thinks it’s a big deal, but he’s not sure whether it will be ready for production out of the gate.

Al Hilwa, applications development software director for IDC, wrote the same note to us and to ReadWriteWeb, which published a story on the release. Basically he says the certification for Java EE 6 is a big deal because it brings it “in commercial form” to Oracle Fusion Middleware shops.

“Adoption of new versions of Java EE typically moves slowly in the enterprise but offering a certified implementation of the standard framework moves the commercial user migration process along,” he wrote.

Finally, Michel Schildmeijer, an Oracle Fusion Middleware architect at Dutch IT consultancy AMIS Technologies, wrote that he was impressed with Weblogic 12c’s integration with Oracle Exalogic. He added that Weblogic 12c’s value will come when other Oracle products move to 12c as well.

“WebLogic 12c will be ready for all kinds of other products from the Oracle portfolio like the SOA Suite, WebCenter and so on, although those products will be at the 12c level in the coming 2012/2013 year,” he wrote.