ReadWriteWeb

At London's Royal Opera House yesterday Oracle presented their perspective and strategy on cloud computing along with two industry experts, Amazon's CTO, Werner Vogels and Gartner's VP of research, Phil Dawson.

The consensus was that the industry is heading towards a mix of public and private clouds. Although by Werner Vogels' definition, private clouds are not true clouds. True clouds, he argues, allow you to think about resources in an unconstrained manner. Elasticity and pay-as-you-go pricing are central to Vogels' definition. When resources are switched off, you stop paying. If privately owned, a cloud would have fixed capacity (no elasticity) and would always have fixed operation costs - regardless of utilization.

Samsung is taking aggressive steps to reach deep into the enterprise with plans for a suite of mobile collaboration applications and partnerships with the likes of Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle and a host of others.

The collaborative tools including enterprise email, instant messaging security, mobile device management, unified communications, customer relationship management, salesforce automation and business intelligence.

Samsung is working with its channel partners to provide the applications. It's another form of bundling, really, providing options for what products an enterprise customer may want to include on devices for its employees.

Oracle is launching a worldwide, cloud computing tour. It's a 50-stop show for developers and system administrators.

But is the tour really about cloud computing? It seems more like virtualization with a touch of focus on how to leverage public cloud environments from providers like Amazon Web Services.

The rise of cloud computing looks like it has lead to the fall of SAP CEO Léo Apotheker, who resigned over the weekend.

It's not that cloud computing has been absent at SAP. There are a number of efforts underway. But it's the lack of any unified strategy that is most notable.

"They have been exploring the cloud," said Ray Wang of the Altimeter Group. "It's how quickly they have responded is the question of contention."

On Jan. 27 Oracle announced it had finalized its acquisition of Sun. In doing so it adds a number of open source darlings to its portfolio, MySQL, Java and VirtualBox to mention just a few.

Now that Oracle has acquired VirtualBox, what does this mean for the virtualization market?

Larry Ellison may be remembered as the one who steered clear of the "folly" that is cloud computing. Or he may be remembered for ignoring the real and considerable impacts that the cloud brings.

Or he may also be remembered for staying true to what Oracle does best. And that's providing the underlying infrastructure for any platform, be it in the cloud or on-premise.

Or it may be that Ellison is simply bluffing. Oracle is really not killing the Sun Open Cloud. In its marathon event last week to discuss its plans for Sun, Ellison apparently hooted and howled about the cloud. He asked if anyone could explain it to him at all. He heard little if no response. He said Oracle is discontinuing the Sun Open Cloud, that they don't want to be like Amazon Web Services, that they are not a public cloud service, and that Oracle is not in the business of renting by the minute.

Larry Ellison completed Oracle's purchase of Sun this week. Now he is making it clear he wants a professional basketball team.

There have been rumors for months that Ellison wanted to purchase the beleaguered Golden State Warriors, a National Basketball Association team out of the San Francisco Bay area.

Several days ago, we called MySQL's falling prey to Oracle one of the top 10 tech-related failures of 2009.

It seems we're in good company, as one of MySQL's founders, Monty Widenius, the man who spent the past 27 years creating and working on MySQL, is using his personal blog to incite a mass letter-writing campaign to the European Commission in order to ensure the open-source future of the popular database. We're not the only ones who questioned whether MySQL would "succumb to corporate lameness" after a takeover by a major closed-source competitor. In fact, Widenius speculates that Oracle could close or even kill all or parts of MySQL.

The U.S. Department of Justice may have approved the purchase of Sun Microsystems by Oracle, but the deal still could be delayed by yet another institution. The Brussels-based European Commission still has 48 hours to open an in-depth investigation, reports Reuters, and the DOJ's European counterparts are looking much more closely at Oracle owning MySQL.

Is a leading enterprise vendor buying out its open source competition a violation of antitrust laws? In its approval the U.S. authorities cited no concern about MySQL, and focused largely on Java licensing issues. Sun's shareholders voted to go ahead with the multi-billion dollar deal back in July, when it was still under scrutiny from the DOJ.

Enterprise giant Oracle released its Database 11g Release 2 today, and it now supports OpenCalais, the Semantic Web service from Thomson Reuters. Native support for OpenCalais means users can now extract rich semantic metadata about people, places, companies, and events. Oracle directly calls the OpenCalais API through your normal database administration, though users will still have to grab an API key from Reuters.

OpenCalais began as the Clear Forest service and was acquired by Reuters back in 2007. By pairing with a leading enterprise-class database like Oracle, OpenCalais will prove that it can handle increasingly large document transactions, providing better search indexing and other semantic know-how to businesses as well as the consumer Web.