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Posts from the ‘Oracle’ Category

Aug 4

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Oracle Files Suit Against Oasis Research LLC Over Cloud Computing Patents

Oracle chose to go on the offensive today against Oasis Research LLC, who accused the company of violating six different patents in the development, marketing and service of Oracle On Demand, Oracle CRM On Demand and other applications.

Oracle chose to file their suit against Oasis Research LLC in Delaware federal court, seeking both a declaratory judgment of noninfringment and invalidity of six U.S. patents.  On May 26th, 2011 counsel representing Oasis Research sent a letter to Oracle alleging  the enterprise software company of “utilizing and benefiting from technologies and features covered in Oasis’ patents”.  According to the complaint filed in Delaware federal court, Oasis alleges that Oracle is offering for sale, selling, maintaining and supporting various online fee-based SaaS products including but not limited to Oracle On Demand and Oracle CRM On Demand based on Oasis patented intellectual property.  The letter concluded with Oasis demanding licensing agreements and fees from Oracle.

Oasis Research did not invent the technologies mentioned in this suit, they were acquired from Intellectual Ventures Computing Platform Assets LLC.  Oracle alleges in the complaint that the primary business model of Oasis is to obtain licensing revenues based on the inventory of patents they own, arguing that lack of investment in these technologies limits their patentability.

The six patents named in the complaint include the following:

  • U.S. Patent No. 5,771,354 pertains to an Internet online backup system that provides remote storage for customers using IDs and passwords that are interactively established when signing up for backup services.  This patent was originally issued on June 23, 1998.
  • U.S. Patent No. 5,901,228 refers to commercial online backup services that provide transparent extended storage to remote customers over telecommunications links.  This patent was issued May 4, 1999.
  • U.S. Patent 6,014,651 refers to commercial online software distribution systems and methods using encryption for security.  This patent was issued January 11, 2000.
  • U.S. Patent 6,327,579 defines online services including help desk, anti-virus and/or application service features   This patent was issued December 4, 2001.
  • U.S. Patent 6,411,943 defines an Internet online backup system that provides remote storage for customers using IDs and passwords which were interactively establish when signing up for backup services.  This patent was issued June 25, 2002.
  • U.S. Patent 7,080,051 defines Internet download systems and methods providing software to Internet computer users for local execution.  This patent was issued July 18, 2006.

Oracle alleges in the compliant none of these patents have been infringed, seeks relief from the licensing attempts by Oasis, and also seeks a declaration that one or more of the patents-in-suit fail to meet the conditions of patentability.  Oracle is also seeking coverage of all costs, expenses, disbursements and reasonable attorney fees.

Conclusion

Given the amount of hours attorneys at Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Infor and many other enterprise software companies are going to log in the next several years over patent infringement, it makes sense to create an application to streamline contract, patent and legal processes.  It’s a perfect application for a database company to build, and lends itself well to analytics and reporting all delivered via the SaaS platform. Litigation burns thousands of hours, millions of dollars, is a major distraction to any business and taken together form a set of requirements ideal for these companies to tackle with what they do best: develop applications to solve complex business problems.

Sources: (free opt in required) http://www.law360.com/ip/articles/262334/oracle-files-pre-emptive-suit-over-cloud-computing-ip

 

Jun 12

15 Comments

Gartner Search Analytics Shows Spike in Platform as a Service (PaaS) Inquiries in 2011

Trends of search terms from user accounts and topics of their inquiries form the catalyst of research agendas in many IT advisory firms.  At Gartner these two factors and others like them are commonly regarded as leading indicators of future IT spending.

Gartner has been delivering short analyses of these subject areas to clients in the form of reports, with the latest being Search Analytics Trends: Platform as a Service published on June 9, 2011.  This report covers user search activity from April, 2009 to March, 2011. For purposes of the report, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is defined as cloud application infrastructure services delivered as a service.  Gartner makes the point that PaaS includes no traditional software license and is expensed on a metered or utility basis.  Presented below is the time series of searches by month from the report.

A few key take-aways emerge from the report, and they are presented below:

  • Cloud Middleware Services including Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) are still unknown to many Gartner IT user clients.  As a result this area is seen with skepticism by many of their clients.  In studies of PaaS adoption from other analysts at Gartner and Forrester, it is evident that internal software development will make or break the credibility of PaaS initiatives for the long-term.
  • When Gartner IT users search for PaaS on the website and throughout online research, the four most common secondary terms are IaaS and SaaS (7.05%), Magic Quadrant (6.12%) and cloud (5.72%).  Clearly Gartner IT user clients are looking to define their own technology stack in this area and looking for a framework of reference of where PaaS fits into their own IT plans and architectures.  The competitive intensity across the analyst community will most likely go up as a result of the uncertainty many IT buyers have over PaaS.
  • The top three vendors that Gartner IT users search for are Microsoft (18%), Amazon (13%) and Tata (11%).  Additional vendors include IBM (11%), Salesforce.com (11%), SAP (7%), Google and Oracle (4%).

Bottom line: The key to PaaS adoption in larger enterprises, many of which are IT user clients of Gartner, is how successfully Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) clarify their value proposition and how their apps add value to the platform layer.

Nov 14

2 Comments

Oracle’s 2010 Roadmap to Enterprise Cloud Computing

At the 7th Annual Cloud Expo held earlier this month at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Rex Wang of Oracle presented his company’s 2010 roadmap to Cloud Computing.  Rex is the VP of Product Marketing with responsibility for cloud and grid computing, in addition to enterprise architecture, modernization and embedded systems.

Key take-aways from this presentation include the following:

  • 28.6% of respondents have internal or private clouds today according to an IOUG Study cited in the presentation.
  • 54.% of respondents do not use public cloud providers.
  • 24.7% use Application Server Platform as a Service, the highest percentage across PaaS and IaaS adoption from the study completed.
  • Financial & accounting (19.6%), HR (18.6%) and collaboration-based apps including e-mail (18.2%) are the three most common applications running on private cloud services

Oracle’s 2010 roadmap to Cloud Computing provides insights into how they are shaping their private cloud value proposition and selling strategy around Exadata, Exalogic, and WebLogic.  Oracle clearly sees private clouds dominating.

Bottom line: The future of cloud architectures will be much more hybrid in structure and scope, as every enterprise has legacy data that cannot be easily moved into private clouds.  Add in the complexity of aggregating and normalizing unstructured content, and the direction of cloud architectures will be more hybrid, less private, over time.

Sep 27

1 Comment

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison defines Cloud Computing at OpenWorld

For all the hype and millions spent entertaining customers, analysts and the press at OpenWorld, Oracle isn’t really breaking new ground here. They are taking their enterprise model and shifting it not to a cloud strategy, but an enterprise stack. The following video is excellently done by IDG and worth watching.

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Sep 27

Red Cloud Rising – How Oracle Is Creating the Next Enterprise Stack

As Oracle continues to build out their enterprise stack with acquisitions over the next year, sales of the Exalogic Elastic Cloud will be a leading indicator of how successful their new systems strategy is and where. Most likely stealth environments including aerospace and defense, banking and financial services will immediately see a need. Oracle has taken the concept of cloud computing and used it as a unifying concept to make their acquisitions make sense. It remains to be seen if Oracle customers will be willing to make such significant changes during a time when any purchasing or spending risks are being avoided.

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Sep 19

Oracle’s Cloud Computing Vision Meets Reality at OpenWorld – Part I

Bottom line: Look for Oracle to make a play for the evolution of private clouds to hybrid clouds through middleware and still own the entire technology stack, from Java all the way to applications.

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Feb 9

Oracle Sees the Light of Cloud Computing and Launches World Tour

Bottom line: During previous quarterly earnings calls Oracle has often said they see cloud computing as an aberration and a business that could not scale to profitability. Not wanting to leave any money on the table with enterprise accounts, Oracle gets cloud religion just in time to upsell servers, services and infrastructure. Larry’s favorite cloud color is currency green.

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