Attending Oracle Open World this month was a great way to find out the latest advancements and future directions of Oracle Corporation and its product offerings. Oracle has been busy creating the Engineered Systems offering of Exadata, Exalogic, and Exalytics. The main advantage to the Engineered Systems offering is that they have been optimized to run Oracle applications.

Having an application offering and hardware offering bundled together seems like a great idea, although not necessarily a new one. IBM dominated the market in the 1970s and 1980s with mainframe systems and applications that were optimized to run together. The major drawback to the IBM model was the proprietary nature of mainframe systems.

Oracle could potentially create proprietary alterations to their hardware, operating systems, and applications to optimize the performance.  This can be a slippery slope to start down. One of the major reasons that organizations moved to open systems in the 1990s was to get away for proprietary hardware and applications that drove up the price of hardware and software while at the same time limiting independent software vendor (ISV) competition.

When evaluating Oracle Applications and Oracle Engineered Systems, make sure you evaluate Oracle’s roadmap for signs of proprietary features that can block the development of third party ISV solutions to help you manage your IT landscape. Failure to do this might mean you are locked into “Big-Red” rather than “Big-Blue”

Attending Oracle Open World this month was a great way to find out the latest advancements and future directions of Oracle Corporation and its product offerings. Oracle has been busy creating the Engineered Systems offering of Exadata, Exalogic, and Exalytics. The main advantage to the Engineered Systems offering is that they have been optimized to run Oracle applications.

Having an application offering and hardware offering bundled together seems like a great idea, although not necessarily a new one. IBM dominated the market in the 1970s and 1980s with mainframe systems and applications that were optimized to run together. The major drawback to the IBM model was the proprietary nature of mainframe systems.

Oracle could potentially create proprietary alterations to their hardware, operating systems, and applications to optimize the performance.  This can be a slippery slope to start down. One of the major reasons that organizations moved to open systems in the 1990s was to get away for proprietary hardware and applications that drove up the price of hardware and software while at the same time limiting independent software vendor (ISV) competition.

When evaluating Oracle Applications and Oracle Engineered Systems, make sure you evaluate Oracle’s roadmap for signs of proprietary features that can block the development of third party ISV solutions to help you manage your IT landscape. Failure to do this might mean you are locked into “Big-Red” rather than “Big-Blue”

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