Oracle OpenWorld Day 1 - update 2

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Quinton Wall's Blog | November 12, 2007   5:26 PM | Comments (0)

Post lunch entertainment at Oracle Openworld was provided by Mark Hurd, CEO of HP. Mark Hurd took a unique approach his presentation where they previously recorded a number of random questions from Openworld attendees covering any topic from tennis with Larry Elison and the future of the IT industry. Below is a distilled collection of some of the more pertinent questions and answers that I captured as best as I could, blognoting in the crowd.

Audience question:How is HP and Oracle approaching BI?
Answer: More information will be created in the next 5 years than in the history of the world. HP has 20 petabytes of data and an average customer call of 4.5 minutes. During this time the call center rep basically has 3 minutes to get the information and an answer to the customer so BI is incredibly important to them so important that HP is coming out with a special BI appliance.

Audience question:what are you doing in the software space?
Answer:HP is focused on management software (data, hardware etc) as demonstrated through their recent acquisition of Opsware The goal is end to end visibility and being the best in the management category. HP is investing heavily on organic R&D in this space.

Audience question:What is the role of IT in business?
Answer:HP objectives: 1) best info on the planet (at one stage had hundreds of data centers) 2) $1.1 trillion of market opportunity. IT has to get the job done at an affordable model 3)IT has to operate in a risk free environment - business continuity 4) do it all with HP technology and partners. Hurd stated that to be successful business has to share those objectives through and through. They have to be integrated at the core. "The place great IT starts is with the CEO" IT is there to help accomplish business objectives.

Audience question:If HP had a crystal ball what players will be around in 10 years?
Answer:Hurd was careful when answering this but strongly indicated that he felt more consolidation especially in vertical industries would occur. CEOs get companies positioned strategically, operationally and get the best people. In the end math wins. Only a handful of companies (those will over 100 million in cash) can keep pace and will drive consolidation through standards and interoperability. If the right companies would get together the acceleration will increase.

Audience question:how is HP acting on the promise of the next generation data center?
Answer:It is not just a slogan. Internally they, HP, are recreating data center from ground up and investing/aligning roadmap through virtualization at server and data level. There is a need to manage all the way through app architecture and devices. Not only are they helping IT automate the business but automate the IT process at the same time. Hurd suggested that HP took 3 years to consolidate applications (from 6k down to 1.5k) and it is far from done. Next Generation datacenters are not about changing not just the physical layout of facility but also about the entire architecture that is developed and deployed. HP is living it every day to align IT assets to make it a reality.

Audience question: What do you think of Yahoo and Google? Friend or Foe?
Answer: HP loves ecosystem of more content and a desire to have this content also global makes it a fantastic IT opportunity for HP. Infrastructure modernization is a great opportunity. Think of companies involved in creating content and data; not just yahoo, google, newcorp, aol, dreamworks - anybody who creates content whether it is text, video, structured unstructured, blogs, more real-time, more time sensitive...the more data the more infrastructure needs to react. HPs job to make sure the infrastructure supports this. Kids are used to getting information instantly which is a huge issue for HP. The next generations tolerance for waiting for info is next to nothing....but their info is not secure or authenticated. eg: Mark Hurd's DOB is wrong on wikipedia and this info is used to be quoted in other sources - insecure open collaborative environment - people are begging for it. The infrastructure build out in India, China, Eastern Europe is exploding!

Onwards to more adventures in Oracle land...

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