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The Oracle OpenWorld 2015 event, which kicked off yesterday in San Francisco, had what one would expect from such a conference; product and integration announcements, alongside a smattering of competitor bashing.

First off, the announcements. Oracle unveiled the Exa Your Power Program, a system which enables customers to migrate off IBM Power systems to Oracle Engineered Systems through Intel technology. The program, which is jointly funded by both Oracle and Intel, offers customers a free proof of concept migration for sample databases, customised reports documenting the migration process and a ‘comprehensive’ roadmap for companies looking to modernise their database environments.

The software giant also announced a record number of partners are adopting Oracle’s cloud technologies, while announcing a new cloud program with Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). New designations within OPN will first appear on February 1, while a new entry point into the OPN program, the Cloud Registered level, will require no initial investment from organisation looking to grow their business with Oracle’s cloud.

In the keynote speech on Sunday night, Oracle chief technology officer Larry Ellison argued “it seems like early days” for cloud businesses, and added SAP and IBM were no longer on the company’s competitive radar.

“In this new world of cloud computing, everything has changed – almost all of our competitors are new,” he told delegates, adding: “We now compete with Salesforce.com and a new company called Workday. Those are the companies we see most frequently when we are selling applications in the marketplace, and we virtually never, ever see SAP.

“This is a stunning change,” added Ellison. “The largest application company in the world is still SAP, but we never see them in the cloud. We sell a lot of applications in the cloud, but we compete with Salesforce, and Workday, and not SAP.”

IBM was equally dismissed as “nowhere in the cloud”, but Ellison admitted he had respect for how Microsoft has turned around its fortunes. “Microsoft is the only one of our traditional competitors that has crossed the chasm, and is now competing aggressively in the cloud business at all three layers,” the Oracle CTO explained.

Those three layers are, of course, the software and application side, the infrastructure, and the platform layer. “Here’s the irony of it all,” Ellison told the audience. “We went into the SaaS business, and…that required us to be in the platform business. We went into the platform business, and came to understand we had to be in the infrastructure as a service business. That’s how we got to where we are today.”

Regular readers of this publication will recall Oracle’s various attempts to bolster its cloud focus, particularly this time last year when the company was hoovering up executives, from SAP head of cloud Shawn Price to former Google App Engine mastermind Peter Magnusson. Yet IBM and SAP may rankle at the criticism from Ellison; both companies will arguably say their cloud operations are succeeding as well as, if not better, than Oracle’s.

Wearables and the Internet of Things (IoT) are two of the most-rapidly growing segments in today’s mobile space. There’s a good reason for this. Smartphones and apps for smartphones have become mainstream and increasingly, businesses and investors are looking for fresh ways to create value. Having developed award-winning IoT products, I recently sat down with Washington, DC-based IT research firm Clutch to share Movel ‘s insights and expertise about the design and development process for wearables.

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For many IT managers, this is still a bit of a shock. Sure, most companies stopped a long time ago featuring their data center on a raised floor behind glass, right next to their reception area, but for many IT professionals a trip to the company data center still feels a little bit like coming home. I can still remember the disappointment of the IT operations manager of a financial institution located right in the heart of Amsterdam, when his brand new mainframe was delivered. That the new system only occupied barely half of the available floor space, was not what got him. It was the fact that the new million dollar plus system no longer came with enterprise-grade tokenring, but instead was fitted with literally the same Ethernet card as his just – in the context of an employee PC project – delivered home PC.

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I was writing a small app in Angular 2 in TypeScript with the on-the-fly transpiling by SystemJS.

I needed to implement a router that would switch between the Home and ProductDetail views in a single page app.

The root component had two links and was supposed to render either Home or ProductDetail components depending on which link the user clicks. Angular 2 offers a pretty elegant syntax for this:

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Cloud computing delivers on-demand IT resources that provide businesses flexibility. The challenge is the cost and complexity of cloud security compliance (PCI, HIPAA, FFIEC). Raxak Protect automated cloud security enables cloud apps to be deployed quickly and cost-effectively. Get the guide to decreasing your security costs up to 50% through automated cloud security.

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In the 1970s, a psychologist named Noel Burch created a learning model to describe how humans go through four stages of learning when introduced to a new skill.

This model is known as “The Four Stages of Competence”. In my latest post on Forbes I use this model to describe how organizations traverse the learning process as they start adopting the cloud.

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In their session at @ThingsExpo, Shyam Varan Nath, Principal Architect at GE, and Ibrahim Gokcen, who leads GE’s advanced IoT analytics, focused on the Internet of Things / Industrial Internet and how to make it operational for business end-users. Learn about the challenges posed by machine and sensor data and how to marry it with enterprise data. They also discussed the tips and tricks to provide the Industrial Internet as an end-user consumable service using Big Data Analytics and Industrial Cloud.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Ericsson has been named “Silver Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 17th Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Ericsson strives to connect everyone, wherever they may be. Because by being connected, people can take part in the emerging global collaboration that is the Networked Society – a society in which every person and every industry is empowered to reach their full potential.

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The IoT’s basic concept of collecting data from as many sources possible to drive better decision making, create process innovation and realize additional revenue has been in use at large enterprises with deep pockets for decades. So what has changed?
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Prasanna Sivaramakrishnan, Solutions Architect at Red Hat, will discuss the impact commodity hardware, ubiquitous connectivity, and innovations in open source software are having on the connected universe of people, things and information in the IoT.

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