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As an Oracle Partner, you cannot escape the relentless push from Oracle to become “specialized” in one or more Oracle products.

If the purpose of this program had been to ensure that partners actually know what they’re talking about, I would have been all in favor. But unfortunately, the main purpose of the program seems to be to push Oracle partners to sell more Oracle software. The specialization requirements include demonstrating some knowledge (a good thing), but also selling a specific number of licenses each year (not necessarily a good thing).

A systems integrator like Scott/Tiger doesn’t sell very much software. Instead, we integrate and ensure that the customer is successful with the Oracle software he or she has. We’re just as much a part of the Oracle ecosystem as companies selling licenses - but Oracle’s “specialization” message effectively tells us to peddle some software or go away.

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Earlier this year, I was at a conference where a keynote speaker decided to use text messages to solicit input from the audience.

To my surprise, many of the the anonymous messages that appeared on the screen were juvenile, inane or downright aggressive. I raised this with the leadership of the user group, but found that what I consider cyber-bullying was not seen as an issue at all.

Are IT professionals ruder than other people, or do people just generally get obnoxious when anonymous? And must we accept that? Maybe Facebook’s Randy Zuckerberg is right when she says that anonymity online “has to go away.”

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Oracle announced a number of cloud offerings at Oracle Openworld. However, as is often the case with OpenWorld announcements, we are still waiting for actual products to materialize.

The first cloud offering likely to appear as a real product is the Oracle Database Cloud Service. This is because Oracle has already been running this service for free at apex.oracle.com. The only difference I expect is that it will now have a monthly fee and the wording about not using it for production purposes will be removed.

The Oracle Java Cloud Service is still pending and we probably won’t see it until 2012.

For both of these cloud services, Oracle has apparently not worked out the pricing yet. This supports the hypothesis that Oracle felt they had to rush something with a “cloud” moniker to market at OpenWorld, but they don’t really know what their value proposition is yet. Oracle has a history of building great software products, but tends to attach “enterprise” (= very high) price tags to them, pricing them out of reach of 90% of the market. Since the technical cloud offerings should appeal to the wider market, it will be interesting to see if Oracle gets it right this time.

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