Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems continues to reshape the competitive landscape in the software and IT industry. Perhaps nowhere else is this more apparent than in the long-running battle between Oracle and IBM. By packaging together database software and systems in Exadata – especially with storage and server technology from Sun, which was already an arch IBM competitor – Oracle has ignited a “stack” war with Big Blue. Pick up the Financial Times or other business press, and you are likely to see one of Oracle’s trademark no-frills advertisements claiming Exadata’s benchmark performance superiority to IBM database systems.
IBM has hardly taken Oracle’s jabs lightly; for example, it has responded recently with benchmark results that assert lower overall database system costs compared with Oracle/Sun systems. I’m not going to write about benchmark wars here, but I will say that as stacks turn into pre-configured appliances, apples-to-apples comparisons of price and performance get tougher. It is important to examine closely the specifics of what the marketed benchmark results are reporting: in other words, whether the price-performance numbers account for all software and hardware costs, just hardware or whatever. This is especially true for organizations evaluating database appliances that offer pre-configured systems that integrate software, storage and server technology.
My focus here is on how IBM, with its recent software and systems announcements to support its “smarter systems for a smarter planet” strategy, is aimed at changing the basis of competition. To be sure, IBM has been traveling in this direction for a lot longer than just since Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. However, at the launch event (April 7, IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose), you could feel the temperature in the room rise whenever Oracle came up. IBM needed to respond to Oracle, but there’s a lot more going on than a battle of database machines.
The April announcements brought technology substance to IBM’s long-running campaign to educate the market about why “the planet” needs to be smarter. In short, the context IBM has been articulating is that public and private organizations in all industries are growing increasingly dependent on the flow of data for everything they do. This includes the data tsunami arriving in the form of sensor data, online clicks and comments, surveillance and more. If they wish to improve processes, performance, customer service, market intelligence and innovation, they need to use data effectively and be “smarter.” This must happen with all information activities, including analytics and transaction processing.
The significance from a technology perspective is that software and systems can’t be part of the problem. Organizations need technology that does not simply add to the headaches of poorly integrated information silos, no “end-to-end” view of performance and prohibitive costs for scalability and speed. It’s not good enough just to deliver a souped-up database machine; the technology must offer something more, so that the organization can become smarter, not dumber.
Each of the announced systems (preconfigured for x86, Unix/Linux and System Z platforms) has distinctive features; those based on the POWER7 processor were the most impressive. However, the unifying theme for all was workload optimization. Arvind Krishna, general manager for Information Management in the IBM Software Group contrasted “closed” appliances with IBM’s workload optimized systems, which he said are designed to take on additional capabilities and flex to the workload demand so that the system remains efficient, cost-effective and scalable. IBM Research’s Bijan Davari, IBM Fellow and vice president for Next Generation Computing touted IBM’s workload optimization leadership “spanning decades,” particularly in mainframes, and described ongoing research. IBM demonstrated how the DB2 pureScale Application systems optimize workloads for transaction-intensive systems, and the Smart Analytics systems do so for BI and analytics.
Pardon me for using political consultant James Carville’s ugly phrase, but to have smarter systems, it’s the workload, stupid. Organizations must understand their current and anticipated workload, and then choose the technology platform (or external service) appropriately. They must ensure that the systems they choose enable continuous analysis, management and optimization of workloads from the end-to-end, user experience perspective, so that as demand intensifies and more data flows through, performance does not suffer and costs don’t skyrocket. Move over, speeds and feeds: workload is what matters.
I wrote a column, linked here, for Intelligent Enterprise – InformationWeek, reporting on developments at Lawson Software’s CUE-10 in San Antonio, Texas.
