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It's a sign of Oracle's transformation that a new release of the vendor's flagship database software seemingly gets third billing behind new cloud computing services and "engineered systems" such as the new Exadata X3 Database In-Memory Machine.
Oracle executives would probably deny that and profess that they love all their children equally. But here at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 it's clear that the emphasis is not on the Oracle Database 12c (the "c" is for cloud) as a stand-alone product, but on how it fits into the Oracle "stack" of technologies.
"Best-of-breed technology at every level of the stack," said Oracle President Mark Hurd in a press conference Monday, emphasizing the vendor's goal of offering leading products from data storage and servers, to virtualization and database software, up through middleware applications.
"Our objective is for each of those levels of the stack, each of those layers of the stack, to be the absolute best at the job they perform," Hurd said.
[Related: Oracle Readies Cloud Blitz With New Partner Specialization, Integration Programs]
At the press conference, as he did earlier Monday in a brief keynote speech, Hurd said developing best-of-breed technology at each level is one of Oracle's four overarching strategies, along with integrating those components into the company's line of engineered systems, delivering next-generation cloud applications, and using all that technology to provide industry-specific systems.
Sunday night, in his own keynote, CEO Larry Ellison unveiled both the Oracle Database 12c and Exadata X3 -- the latter the third generation of the Exadata system that debuted in 2008. He also detailed Oracle's plans to expand its cloud offerings to include Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) services, and to offer an option for customers to implement Oracle Cloud as a private cloud system.
"We're now the only [vendor] with a complete cloud offering, end-to-end," Hurd said Monday."This is a big deal." He acknowledged that Oracle's efforts will mean more "co-opetition" with companies such as Salesforce.com, which competes with Oracle in the CRM application space but also uses Oracle database and middleware software to run its services.
NEXT: More Details Offered On The Oracle Database 12c Release
