Executive vice president Phillips opened the company’s OracleWorld conference calling the annual user event a milestone for Oracle and the industry, ushering in the era of grid.

Oracle used the show’s opening to launch versions of its database and application server it claims are capable of running customers’ existing applications in a grid environment.

Some OracleWorlds are more important than others, said Phillips playing-up Oracle’s decision to launch 10g products at this year’s event.

Oracle is the latest in a series of big computing names to adopt grid computing, following IBM, Hewlett Packard Co and Sun Microsystems Inc. CEOs from the latter two will take the stage at OracleWorld today and Thursday in support of Oracle, and also promote their own companies’ strategies.

Unlike, those others’ strategies, though, Oracle is taking a more limited grid vision. 10g will only works with Oracle’s other grid-enabled software, while Oracle’s Enterprise Manager will be extended to work with systems management frameworks from vendors like IBM and HP being extended to manage mixed environments.

The company also appears to be championing grid computing to differentiate its database and application server against competitors. Despite growing market share, the 9i Application Server, for example, still lags market leaders BEA Systems Inc and IBM Corp, according to analysts’ statistics. Gartner, meanwhile, found IBM grabbed the number-one RDMBS market position from Oracle in 2002.

Enterprise Manager will not manage application servers from competitors, like BEA Systems Inc.

Phillips, though, used yesterday’s show opening to sound the industry’s homage to grid computing. In an early morning keynote, Phillips told show delegates grid computing allowed virtualization of computing resources such as processing power and storage.

He also attempted to silence any cynics who may think grid-based computing is not yet ready, and who may wish to delay a decision to adopt grids.

Phillips said that the time is now ripe for grid. He attributed this to advances in inexpensive commodity two- and four-way blades and operating systems like Linux, the evolution of storage not tied to servers, and the existence of faster interconnections between servers.

Source: Computerwire