Oracle Execs Talk Integration at OpenWorld

Oracle’s annual budget for research and development is $3 billion—a large sum of money that has made its way to customers in the form of product innovation, enhancements and integration.

It is that third area, integration, that was the subject of much of the joint keynote speeches by Oracle co-presidents Charles Phillips and Safra Catz Oct. 12 at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

"I think that the strategy really jelled when we did our own IT transformation, when we realized that most of the hard work is really with you,” Catz said during the keynote. “It turns out that [Oracle] and all the other software vendors were all sending you little pieces of technologies all these years, and it was at your site that you had to make it all work together. And what we thought was that this really didn’t make sense, that long term, companies like us had to take more and more of a responsibility of bringing you systems that worked together.”

In practical terms, Oracle is looking to deliver an integrated application stack to businesses. Oracle has talked about this before. The difference between now and prior years, however, is that from Fusion Middleware 11g to Oracle Database 11g Release 2 to new application integration architecture packages, Oracle has all the products in place to fulfill the vision of how everything will come together, Robert Shimp, group vice president of Oracle's Global Technology Business Unit, said during an interview Oct. 12 with eWEEK.

“Our core strategy is complete, open and integrated, and we’ve actually talked about that now [for] probably five or six years. … This year, we’ve now put in place all the major pieces,” Shimp said. “When you look at it now, both from a horizontal integration and a vertical integration [standpoint], we are at the point where we are fully integrated from the operating system and the server virtualization layer all the way up through to the applications layer … and through all the specialized-industry applications—all on a common technology base.”

“This is the culmination of years and years and years of effort, and now here at OpenWorld we’re finally showing all the things in full GA [general availability],” he said.

According to Phillips, much of the $3 billion in research and development gets spent providing enhancements requested by customers, and users can expect more of the same when Sun Microsystems is officially in the company's roster, he said.

“We’ll do what we’ve always done—make the products better,” he told the audience.