On the eve of OpenWorld: Oracle's massive OpenWorld conference begins in San Francisco starting this Sunday, and as usual its agenda defies an easy summary, given the depth and breadth of Oracle's product portfolio. However, there are certainly a number of standout announcements on tap. Here's a look at some of the expected highlights.
- On Sunday, CTO and executive chairman Larry Ellison will deliver a keynote detailing Oracle's cloud strategy, but particularly focusing on its new Autonomous Database cloud service. Ellison revealed its existence a couple of weeks ago during Oracle's most recent earnings call, terming it a "self-driving" database that can patch and tune itself while running. Oracle is also planning to offer a 99.995 percent uptime SLA for the database.
What to watch for: Oracle's database has had some level of autonomous features going back several versions, so it will be Ellison's job to explain what's new and different about the service's capabilities. It will also be interesting to see how Oracle addresses any concerns among its vast DBA community, which has been a huge driver of the Oracle database's continued market share dominance. Oracle has said the Autonomous Database can cut human labor requirements significantly.
- Oracle CEO Mark Hurd takes the keynote stage on Monday. He'll make the case that it "is no longer a question of if—but rather when—companies will completely move their operations to the cloud," according to a statement. Hurd will be joined onstage by representatives from Bloom Energy, FedEx and the Gap, who will presumably share stories that reflect Hurd's premise.
What to watch for: Hurd will undoubtedly spend some time talking numbers—how quickly Oracle has grown cloud revenue, projections of future growth, and so forth. If he spends more than a minimal amount of time on this, it will be a mistake. Oracle has been positioning itself as a one-stop-shop for cloud, from IaaS to PaaS to SaaS. The sooner Hurd can get those high-profile customers talking about their experience with Oracle's cloud vision, the better.
- On Tuesday, product development chief Thomas Kurian and EVP Dave Donatelli will do a deep dive into Oracle's three cloud buckets. This keynote will also feature Oracle's positioning on emerging technologies, including blockchain, AI and IoT.
What to watch for: It might behoove Donatelli and Kurian to spend more time on Oracle's plays in emerging technology, as Ellison and Hurd will have already covered plenty of ground on its cloud strategy.
- Later Tuesday, Ellison will deliver his second keynote of the show. He has chosen a timely topic for this one: Security. Here's how Oracle's website describes Ellison's planned talk:
How can you protect your organization amid rising security threats? Oracle CTO and Executive Chairman Larry Ellison details how Oracle is advancing the world’s most secure and trusted cloud infrastructure, platform services, and applications.
What to watch for: In the wake of incidents such as the Equifax data breach, Ellison has plenty of rhetorical fodder to work with. Expect this keynote to contain a healthy helping of his trademark competitive trash talk, as he compares Oracle's security approach to rivals such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.
AT&T asks Supremes to overturn Net Neutrality: Along with CenturyLink and the cable industry group NCTA, AT&T has filed an appeal of a lower court's ruling upholding Net Neutrality rules to the Supreme Court. While Internet companies such as Facebook and Google strongly support Net Neutrality, which forbids network communications providers from applying any biases to lawful Internet traffic, telcos say the rules passed under President Barack Obama's administration are overreaching and out of date.
Meanwhile, current Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai is a vocal opponent of net neutrality, and the commision may vote to overturn the rules as soon as December.
POV: In light of the FCC's expected move, AT&T's appeal may seem superflous. But it does have the effect of getting a case on the Supreme Court's radar in advance of the legal fight that will surely come if and when Pai's FCC moves to alter or overturn net neutrality rules. Constellation believes net neutrality should be a top-of-mind issue for not just Internet companies, but all enterprises given the growing influence of macro trends such as cloud computing and IoT.
MIT researchers develop automatic software patching system: In a time when exponentially more consumer applications are being developed and released than ever, and the cloud is driving up the pace of enterprise software updates, a number of researchers at MIT are focused on a highly relevant topic: Automatic patch generation. Here are the key details as described by MIT's news service:
Several research groups, including that of Martin Rinard, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science, have developed templates that indicate the general forms that patches tend to take. Algorithms can then use the templates to generate and evaluate a host of candidate patches.
Recently, at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Rinard, his student Fan Long, and Peter Amidon of the University of California at San Diego presented a new system that learns its own templates by analyzing successful patches to real software.
Where a hand-coded patch-generation system might feature five or 10 templates, the new system created 85, which makes it more diverse but also more precise. Its templates are more narrowly tailored to specific types of real-world patches, so it doesn’t generate as many useless candidates. In tests, the new system, dubbed Genesis, repaired nearly twice as many bugs as the best-performing hand-coded template system.
POV: The researchers' work is a novel use of machine learning that clearly holds great potential for application development and security professionals. Currently, the system works only with code written in Java, but given the language's prevelance it's as good a place to start as any.
