Oracle announced a new Exa-thing during last Oracle Open World: Exalogic. All the week was spent to send messages to “partners”, competitors and customers about how Oracle is beautiful, shiny, powerful and magnificent. (indeed, Jobs and Apple send similar messages to customers and fans… but it’s another story)
The message that Larry and his people are trying to send us is something like:“we want to apply the iPhone business model to the enterprise” or, in other words, the goal is to get what they think best of breed technologies, some integration and a shiny box to build a fully integrated (and very locked) ecosystem capable to grant the best user experience and resolve any pain to the IT people.
I think it is very difficult to apply the Apple business model and approach to enterprise IT because the target audience is very different and some questions come to my mind:
- are we sure that enterprise IT customers want to go back years and buy a locked stack? They already have tried closed environments many times in 80s and 90s and many of them decided to go open;
- the “best personal user experience” you get fron an iPhone isn’t moved by ROI/TCO models, budgets, processes and so on. the iPhone has something to do with technology but many people buy it only because it’s cool to show it in public or similar reasons! I don’t think it is cool to show an exalogic in public (but I may be wrong). 😉
Ok, I’m only joking but, sometimes, truths come from jokes. 😀