In their marathon webcast extravaganza last week, Oracle had a lot to say about the types of customers they’re looking for and how they’re going to sell stuff to them. The overarching themes that we heard over and over again as they laid out their forthcoming value proposition were “Enterprise,” “Mission-critical,” and “Integrated.” The ‘old’ Sun used to talk about this same game, but with a very large, heaping helping of Web 2.0, new app developers, and utility computing. We didn’t hear much, if any, of that stuff from Oracle – which is a good thing, since concentrating on those markets only served to drive Sun into the ground in terms of sales and profitability.

Oracle has come out with a firm message regarding Sun’s sales strategy: it will change.

A few years back, when Sun was flailing, they announced that they would service their top 300 accounts directly and push the rest to the channel. We thought it was a terrible idea at the time, and at analyst conferences, we questioned company management about it. The answers were various flavors of “Everyone else is doing it” and “This will make the channel love us like a junior high school girl with her first boy-band crush.” OK, well, that last quote might not be verbatim; our notes have faded a bit over time.

Finally… the roadblocks to Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems have fallen away, and the deal is – for all intents and purposes – done.

So what did we learn during Wednesday’s 5-hour marathon webcast? A lot. Oracle laid out their entire strategy, at least in a broad sense. True to their word, they intend to stay in the hardware market and carry forward most of Sun’s major product lines. This includes Solaris, of course, but also UltraSPARC-based systems, x86-based systems, and the SPARC64-based systems developed in conjunction with Fujitsu. One of the most detailed accounts of what transpired yesterday is Timothy Prickett Morgan’s article here.

This heralds the beginning of some very interesting times in the industry. Almost from the beginning we believed that Oracle, with the purchase of Sun, had the potential to change the game… and we were pretty much alone in that opinion for quite a while. We communicated that belief to our vendor and end-user clients with varying results and wrote about it here and here.

Our friends at insideHPC pushed this story recently, but there hasn’t been an accompanying groundswell of buzz, so I’m attempting to get the ball rolling.  Mattel, purveyor of the iconic Barbie doll, is running a contest to decide Barbie’s next career. She has quite a wide range of choices for her new job: surgeon, architect, environmentalist, news anchor, and computer engineer.

In the wake of the Google vs. China dustup, we’re starting to see some discussion of the greater implications for computing, both in general and the cloudy Google way. The fact that at least a few Gmail accounts were accessed by hackers looking for dissidents is bound to raise some questions about the security of Gmail specifically and the entire cloud model as well.

For my part, I’ve always felt that security was – and is – one of the biggest concerns with the entire cloud concept.

The recently combined Rackable/SGI is looking to add some new blood to their depleted partner ranks. After the merger, the company dropped about one-third of their combined partners for various reasons and is now trying to rebuild their channel presence. They’re looking for folks who have both enterprise and HPC chops – which makes sense, given their product set and strategy. You can read about it here.

SGI isn’t in an enviable position right now.

Rationality has prevailed: the European Union has finally approved of Oracle’s $7.4bn acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The primary roadblock was concern over the long-term future of MySQL which, I guess, means that having a free relational database is somehow a human right (at least in the EU). However, it seems that Oracle’s ’10-Point Commitment’ has assuaged fears that MySQL and its community will be subsumed or squashed.

Oracle’s plans for Java and the Java Community Process (JCP) have also been a hot topic of speculation, but the general consensus now is that no major changes are in the works. Sure, Oracle could change the rules so that only Oracle software is Java-compliant, use their veto power to their own competitive advantage, etc… but we just don’t see it. It’s too self-defeating. There’s every reason to think that they’ll manage Java and the JCP at least as well as Sun did.

Oracle will be hosting a 5-hour (!) webcast on Wednesday, January 27 that promises to clear up a lot of the details about their plans going forward. We’ll be watching and maybe even providing some running commentary along the way.

What does the finalization of this deal mean to the industry?

Anyone even glancing at the tech news today has to be aware of what has transpired between China and Google over the past 24 hours. Briefly, Google has discovered that China-based hackers have systematically attacked Google’s infrastructure, primarily aiming at the gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents and human rights activists both in China and around the world. China has denied that the hackers were government-supported, but I find that hard to believe. Here’s a full rundown of the story so far. Right now, Google is evaluating their options, with the thought that perhaps leaving China altogether might be the best course.

This standoff between Google and the People’s Republic of China is a big, big deal. It has ramifications for Google, of course, but also much broader implications.

I got a call recently from a reporter who confronted me with an interesting question. He had attended SC04 in Pittsburgh, and one of his key takeaways from the show was that retailing was on the cusp of adopting HPC-style computing to crunch their data in order to improve both top-line and bottom-line results. He asked me:  “Has HPC made it into retailing?” and followed up with “If not, why not?” and “If so, what are they getting out of it?”

If you build a supercomputer out of Atom chips, will someone buy it? That remains to be seen, but it’s a compelling enough idea to score $9.3 million from the U.S. Department of Energy. You can click here to read about SeaMicro, a small company that picked up the dough to develop an Atom-based supercomputer. The story describes a system composed of 512 Atom procs with a petabyte of ‘storage’…  which probably means disk, but could also refer to aggregated memory. There isn’t a lot of information on the system at this point – SeaMicro’s website is Spartan to say the least.  However, it’s said that this system would cost less than $100k and have extremely low power requirements.