Oracle Open World is this week. It is one of the largest tech events and generally comes a few weeks after Salesforce.com's Dreamforce. Both Oracle and Salesforce try to outdo each other and since they are both in San Francisco it usually makes for some humorous stories.
Last year Oracle cancelled Mark Benioff (salesforce,com CEO) who was scheduled to be a keynote speaker after he bashed their "cloud strategy". He quickly put together an event at a local hotel just down the street. You can see it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adjvEEs1A6w. This year Mark made a point to say he wasn't invited to Oracle Open World this year. He took on Microsoft in 2010, but I digress.
Oracle this year is talking a lot about their cloud, but they seem to be using different lingo then everyone else. They were talking about their IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) solution. That was one area that people said they were missing so they made a show of announcing it. Good for them and I think they have some pretty good products. I loved Sun. Java everyone loves and Oracle has always made a great database.
But when they talk about IaaS I think they are confused. See IaaS is Infrastructure. Things like OS, hardware, network, storage, but in Oracle-land they include the database later, which in reality makes it more like a platform as a service or PaaS play. In fact they compare it to Amazon Web Services, which is the leader in PaaS, not IaaS. Amazon has an IaaS play but that's called EC2.
This feels a little bit like "putting lipstick on a pig". Not that their platform as a service isn't a solid offering, but if they want to play in the infrastructure as a service playground at least sell one. They shouldn't just rename their platform offering as infrastructure and expect no one to notice...
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