In The Technology Arena

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. ~Theodore Roosevelt

I have the pleasure of working with some really brilliant people at EiS Technologies.  Definitely a perk.  Anyway, we were chatting a bit today about how the "gloom and doom" crowd has definitely jumped on Oracle with both feet lately.  Salespeople leaving in droves…stock price falling…sales receding…crash and burn on the horizon…blah, blah, blah.

Count me amongst the true believers.  I see the Oracle story a bit differently from the naysayers.  Probably because my focus is more on the technology and, through experience, I've come to learn that the upside of good technology products far outweigh any downside from perceived negatives.  So let's consider that for a moment.

First, keep in mind that applications, architectures, hardware, and other stuff may come and go, but the data remains.  And when it comes to data, Oracle has the best enterprise database we've ever seen - period.  And Oracle continues to incrementally improve that database…more scalability, better features, improved management tools.  Oracle's entire foundation is built on their strongest product.

You want to talk applications?  OK, let's do that.  It's pretty impressive that, over the past decade, the enterprise applications market undergone at least 12 paradigm shifts.  Yet, not only have the Oracle folks continued to improve the Applications Unlimited product lines, but they managed to develop some very strong Cloud Applications (Fusion Apps) at the same time.  And they continue to respond as the market continues to shift like sand under our feet.  Not the simplest apps in the world, but Oracle's apps win competition based on features.  And the move to both in-memory and SaaS will be huge before it's done.

Middleware?  WebLogic.  Glassfish.  Development tools?  JDeveloper IDE.  ADF.  APEX. Enough said.

Yes, I could go on.  But you get the idea.  Now, I haven't owned Oracle stock for years…I see it as a conflict of interest in my job and as a blogger.  But I have to admit it's getting tempting…the naysayers are doing their job really well.  Bring it on - I'll bet on the basis of superb technology products and we'll see how it plays out.

Comments welcome.