It takes some effort to look below the surface and additionally look past the comedic routines of its CEO on stage, but i am sure there are more people in the industry that ask, besides me, why the purveyor of the most robust database appliance in the marketplace offers nothing towards the cloud-based movement of apps running on virtualized hardware: in other words, why is Oracle running hard from hosted infrastructure?…. Even considering security and Identity management webinars coming up, based around cloud-infrastructure and the little salesforce.com competitive hedge that Ellison is invested in: why would oracle not be in the driver’s seat when it comes to offering a competitive cloud based offering around MySQL and Glassfish, along with the ESB, BPM, and tools, not to mention Amberpoint?…. That is the question i have for the roadmap determinants, when they finally release a clustering schedule for glassfish v. 3, and it is a question i have had for Sun for some time now, why is MySQL and Glassfish not reserved for scale-out deployments, when the core Fusion/Oracle DB can handle enterprise accounts?…. Is it resources, that keeping two competing application platforms within the same company would be too distracting, too costly, too cumbersome, too cannibalizing, or too threatening to the money makers of WebLogic and Oracle DB, to just build a cloud org., in the form of MySQL and Glassfish, and put to rest the roadmap questions that will come if Oracle offers anything other than full enterprise-wide, web-wide support for the Sun software assets?…. My only answer can come from the open source model of the Sun infrastructure product-lines that never had a chance in a hardware scenario, but could become true deal makers in a software sales force’s hands, and that is Oracle refuses to abide by a competitive affront to their proprietary model of selling high license cost, and even higher maintenance cost products, that do not have competing organizations, whether they be channel, SI, or ISV to under-cut them on price…. They have spent a lot of money on Sun, for a dying company that was doing great things in OSS terms so they have to get their investment back, through more than just hardware margins, and that means pushing Fusion out the door with little to no impediments to competitive pricing, and honestly where does that pricing pressure come from: not from IBM and WebSphere with Global Services offerings, only Red Hat with JBoss stands in the way of WebLogic pricing, now that Glassfish is safely behind closed doors, or so it seems….. So, I respect the Glassfish people at Oracle, and will listen to them to be patient, and wait for the roadmap, but it is pretty tough now to back-down from what was said two weeks ago with the web event to announce some details of the Glassfish and MySQL purposes within a new Oracle software organization, and wonder why Oracle continues to deride something that everyone else is planning on, in the form of cloud-scale deployments…. It takes integration of apps and data, and it takes open standards, in the form of web services, and honestly it takes Open Source Software in order for those things to happen, and i am not so convinced we are going to see an investment beyond Fusion for engineering resources to be applied to scale-out deployments, like what it would take in the form of Reference Architectures and the like in order for non-techy sales people to translate for customers…. OSS is not what Oracle likes to do, except unless it means hurting or at least attempting to hurt Red Hat’s model for Enterprise Linux by doing their own fork job, and though Mike Lehmann, Thomas Kurian, and Ted Ferrell are saying that OSS will continue, can they promise or agree to definitive support for the open source communities that were built around java.net at Sun?…i dont think they can or are willing to do that, considering the immense under-taking of getting three world-class ERP systems on one app server platform, along with all of the ancillary products to accompany it, in the form of Fusion…. I wonder, and then stop to wonder why there is no cloud future for Glassfish and MySQL because honestly, that was the major threat to Oracle Fusion in the form of technology parity and pricing pressure before the merger, so what is the incentive now to continue them now that they dont have to?…..lots of questions still remain but it becomes clearer as to what Oracle will ultimately prioritize in the face of hard choices on resource allocation, that will come regardless of current promises, and irrespective of amount of money available beyond what Sun had…. The reality will be a hard lesson for anyone trusting altruism from a company specialized to turn a profit at the expense of what is best for its customers….thats not all i am saying, but it begs the question, Oracle: what is so bad about the cloud to your business?….. Java