Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's famous exhortation that "developers, developers, developers" are key to a software company's long-term growth is something that's ever more resonant in today's market, with the "big four" cloud platform providers—Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Google—locked in pitched battle for market share.
Oracle is also staking a claim in IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service), but is later to the game and trailing the pack. While Oracle has a long-standing investment in developer relations, a new 20-city series of conferences called Oracle Code shows the vendor accelerating its game substantially.
The one-day conferences are free of charge and will focus on cutting-edge topics such as containers, microservices, machine learning and low code platforms, along with databases and open source, according to the event website.
Education sessions will cover software development in Java and Node.js as well as "other programming languages and frameworks using Oracle Database, MySQL, and NoSQL databases," the site states. Other event material will include keynotes, hands-on labs and live demonstrations.
Featured speakers include many members of Oracle's developer engagement team, but Oracle is also bringing out at least one big gun in the form of EVP Thomas Kurian, who heads all product development at the company.
Oracle's emphasis on Java for the Code events is telling. Ever since it gained control of the popular programming language in 2010 with the purchase of Sun Microsystems, some observers have questioned Oracle's stewardship of Java. In late 2015, there were rumblings that Oracle was growing disinterested in Java, with one report claiming it was even planning Java's "planned obselecence."
Then in October, Oracle announced that the release of Java 9 would be pushed back by four months to this coming July, saying that more work was needed on Project Jigsaw, which will modularize Java and componetize the Java Runtime Environment, making it easier to scale Java down to smaller devices. Project Jigsaw was originally slated for Java 7 and is a highly-anticipated feature aimed at boosting Java's continued relevance in the cloud era.
On the other hand, Oracle has already been emphasizing polyglot development, as evidenced by the rest of the Code events' agenda.
The Oracle Code event series kicks off March 1 in San Francisco, with other dates occurring in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia-Pacific through August.
Overall, the series is a very good move by Oracle, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "They need to reach out and bring all the developer ecosystems together and educate for the new stack," he says. "It's an overdue move, but better late than never."
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