Business

Oh, this is going to get juicy real quick. U.S. District Judge William Alsup is demanding the names of any writers who have a paid relationship with Oracle or Google. The demand came today in the ongoing lawsuit between the two companies in their dispute over the Android OS. Alsup wrote he is concerned that the parties and/or their lawyers may have hired or paid journalists, commentators or bloggers who then commented on the case. The order was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Alsup writes: “Although proceedings in this matter are almost over, they are not fully over yet and, in any event, the disclosure required by this order would be of use on appeal or on any remand to make clear whether any treatise, article, commentary or analysis on the issues posed by this case are possibly influenced by financial relationships.” Oracle and Google must turn over the names by August 17. The controversy is enveloping Florian Mueller, one of the more incendiar...

Oracle said today they have bought a company called Xsigo that leverages the growing popularity of software defined networking (SDN) — an emerging virtualization technology that is shaking up the way we view IT and the cloud. The acquisition points to a shift in the market that will eventually make Oracle the loser. The cloud is opening up while Oracle is folding inward. Network virtualization is serving as a catalyst for a federated infrastructure that will make the open cloud more viable for an organization than a vertically integrated stack that needs to be managed by teams of IT engineers.  Oracle is rejecting that premise and will use Xsigo to strengthen its own proprietary environment. It’s a losing game that Oracle is playing. Corporate run data centers are going the way of internally managed corporate utilities at the turn of the century.  The industrial giants of the time realized they had no business being in the electricity business. Now companies are realizing the same th...

Oracle is stopping a marketing campaign attacking IBM in wake of a national advertising board‘s recomendation that the company made false claims when comparing its Exadata technology to competing IBM products. It’s the second time in four months the National Advertising Division (NAD)  has taken action against Oracle for making false claims when comparing its Exadata products to IBM’s technology. The NAD is an advertising industry group that falls under the umbrella of the Better Business Bureau. The NAD recommended that Oracle stop making  comparative claims about its Exadata database technology, following  a challenge made by IBM. The NAD said the Oracle “messaging” could not be substantiated. In question is an ad that appeared as a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal that included the following: •    “Exadata 20x Faster … Replaces IBM Again” •    “Giant European Retailer Moves Databases from IBM Power to Exadata … Runs 20 Times Faster” Oracle argued it was using one...

Ron Johnson is best known for creating Apple's retail empire. He's now CEO of retailer JCPenney. This week, he detailed his amazing vision for turning JCPenney into a techno wonderland in Apple's image. And he's turning to Oracle for help. Apple's store design gets almost all the attention. Not as flashy but just as important is the software that does everything from tracking inventory to letting salespeople ring up purchases with iPhones. Like a lot of retailers, JCPenney has old, proprietary code. Johnson is yanking out about 500 applications, nearly all of them custom applications created over the years, and having Oracle be its one-stop shop. This is a big win for Oracle, since its archrival IBM has been entrenched with retailers for decades. (Look at this 1976 article about JCPenney installing IBM cash registers, for example.) Neither company disclosed the size of this deal for Oracle, but it's easy to see that it's big. JCPenney already used quite a b...