OOW13: Sneak Preview of the Major Announcements?! In-Memory Database, PaaS (Database and Java) and M6 big memory machine

Recent press releases as well as the comment provided by Oracle’s top brass around the FY14 Q1 earning provide some insight in what the key stories seem likely to be during this year’s Oracle OpenWorld conference. Note: I write this article before having any real information (that would put be under embargo such as a NDA).

Some remarks around the FY14-Q1 earning report by Mark Hurd seem to suggest certain areas of interest: “….a couple of comments about Oracle OpenWorld, which is next week. We plan to have roughly 60,000 people at the event in San Francisco from 145 countries. We expect to have 2 million attendees online.

And we will make some significant product announcements at the event as well. We’ll be introducing Oracle 12c in-memory database. We’ll be talking about it, being able to deliver 100x faster application performance using our new architectural approach. We’ll talking about — we’ll be talking about existing Oracle apps that can now run in the Oracle Database functionality without change when using this in-memory capability. We’ll have some releases in cloud. We’ll talk about we’ll have some releases in HCM and talent management, we’ll talk about database as a service, Java as a service that will be available to our customers. So there’ll be a whole slew of product announcements there that Larry will be talking about Sunday night and will continue on through the week.

As part of Oracle’s first quarter earnings, Larry Ellison gave a sneak peek into one of the big new product announcements he will make at the company’s annual customer conference next week in San Francisco. “Next week at Oracle OpenWorld, we will announce the In-Memory Option for the Oracle database,” he said in the press release. “Virtually every existing application that runs on top of the Oracle database will run dramatically faster by simply turning on the new In-Memory feature. Our customers don’t have to make any changes to their applications whatsoever; they simply flip on the in-memory switch, and the Oracle database immediately starts scanning data at a rate of billions or tens of billions of rows per second.” Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/ellison-to-reveal-weapon-against-sap-2013-9#ixzz2fJ4qap1v”

PCWorld reports: “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. 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.” See http://www.pcworld.com/article/2047536/larry-ellison-to-talk-inmemory-database-oracle-paas-at-openworld.html for more details.

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. ”