All Eyes On Ellison

won't

A look at the Oracle Web site shows us that Ellison will be giving a talk called "Enabling the Grid -- the Power of 10." It's the grand unveiling of Oracle's 10G Database and Application Server, the latest iterations of the company's flagship products, the ones that will usher in the era of grid computing.

It's a seminal event because the ability to link together clusters of servers, databases and network systems into a unified grid promises to streamline network performance, sharing the workload across the connected devices to make tackling complex tasks more efficient and effective.

It's an approach that has long been used in academia and other research centers, but the race is on to sell the grid concept to the business community. IBM, Sun and HP are also developing grid-based technologies, and the Linux community has latched onto the idea as one of open source's most promising new frontiers.

Ellison will tell OracleWorld attendees why 10G should be the predominant grid solution and is the logical first step toward a more utility-based computing model, one in which users pay for services on an as-needed basis. He'll tell us why this model is superior to what's currently in place. He'll say, correctly, that Oracle is the first company to have a family of grid-capable products ready today, and he'll talk a lot about new eras and the populist need to break down certain Washington state-based hegemonies.

It'll be compelling stuff. Companies often use their annual events to roll out new product lines and updates to old ones, but aside from Macworld, few vendor-hosted shows make much of a splash. More often, their purpose is to press the flesh, stroke the partners a little bit, and generally reassure everyone that all is well (and, in the past few years, that there's no need to panic despite what their stock price says).

But whether Oracle and Ellison like it or not, no matter how much they want to keep the focus on the new technology, the foremost topic on everyone's mind will be PeopleSoft: What's the status of the takeover bid, why did they do it in the first place, does anything change now that PeopleSoft has acquired JD Edwards, what will happen if Oracle's plan succeeds and, more important, what will happen if it fails?

The guess here is that any talk of failure will be verboten; these events typically aren't designed to do anything other than cheerlead the company's latest offerings and future prospects. Sure, Ellison will offer a dig or two at his PeopleSoft counterpart Craig Conway; he is, after all, Larry. (He might start with a sarcastic reference to this week's report that PeopleSoft will cut up to 1,500 jobs once it folds in JD Edwards -- a workforce reduction critics fear Ellison will undertake in spades if his takeover bid goes forward.)

But he probably won't devote much speaking time to the broader takeover issue, to explaining why it makes such incontrovertible sense that the company is willing to devote a year or more and untold resources to this combative quest. He probably won't talk much about why customers and partners shouldn't worry or consider looking elsewhere, not even for a moment, even though the takeover will inevitably distract some attention away from them or cause transitional hassles, if only temporarily. He's unlikely to explain why his company always seems to be the Buffalo Bills of the technology industry -- possessing stellar resources and hall-of-fame talent, producing some significant wins but never quite able to rise all the way to the top.

At this point, there's almost no way to definitively predict the outcome of Oracle's quest for PeopleSoft. Although Ellison might be persuaded to talk a little bit about how he'll reach the promised land if the takeover succeeds, he almost surely won't say much about how he'll do it if the bid fails, about how and why Oracle sans PeopleSoft will still be able to do everything it intended.

He should.