Oracle And SAP Settle Piracy Dispute

Oracle has won a limited victory in its long-running lawsuit with rival SAP.

The action was taken in reference to events dating back to 2007, which saw employees of SAP’s TomorrowNow unit accused of illegally downloading Oracle software.

German company TomorrowNow was bought by SAP as a means to undercut Oracle’s internal tech support rates, with the ambition of getting customers to migrate to SAP solutions, reports Reuters.

In 2006, TomorrowNow started the process of undermining its parent’s position, offering cut-price support to users of the Siebel database and CRM.

Oracle was originally awarded $1.3bn back in 2010, but this was adjusted downwards on multiple appeals.

SAP acknowledged that its employees had been in the wrong, but disputed the damages awarded. SAP offered a $306m payment in 2012, but did so more in hope than expectation given its admissions.

Earlier in the year, a federal judge gave Oracle the option to settle for $356.7m or force a retrial, and the company has now decided on the former with a further $2.5m in interest.

“We are thrilled about this landmark recovery and extremely gratified that our efforts to protect innovation and our shareholders’ interests are duly rewarded,” said Oracle’s general counsel Dorian Daley.

“This sends a strong message to those who would prefer to cheat than compete fairly and legally.”

SAP agreed: “We are also pleased that, overall, the courts hearing this case ultimately accepted SAP’s arguments to limit Oracle’s excessive damages claims and that Oracle has finally chosen to end this matter.”

SAP announced a partnership with IBM last month to bring its HANA service to enterprise cloud users.

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Is IBM Going After HP?

IBM has announced a unified branding for its commerce cloud based enterprise products and services with a presentation at the Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Tampa, Florida.

Hot on the heels of HP, which unified its cloud offerings under the Helion brand last week, IBM Experienceone is designed to allow companies to improve engagement with their customers by leveraging big data through the cloud.

Deployment comes from a unified offer of consulting services, software and infrastructure from IBM subsidary Softlayer, which can be used to gather data, mine analytics and improve customer commerce via a mixture of traditional and cloud services.

IBM has already committed 1,000 new employees for its IBM Interactive Experience who will staff 10 “IBM Interactive Experience Labs” that are being set up to help customers understand the rules of engagement and hopefully increase their level of customer engagement.

IBM GM of Industry Cloud Solution Craig Hayman said, “IBM Experienceone provides a secure and simplified portfolio – including innovation from more than 1,200 partners – to help clients design and deliver more valuable customer engagements. With cloud, on premise and hybrid options, IBM Experienceone quickly scales to engage every customer in the moment while protecting their privacy.”

The IBM Experienceone brand is a coming together of many acquisitions that IBM has made in the field over recent years, including Sterling Commerce, Tealeaf, Coremetrics, Unica, Demandtec, Xtify and Silverpop. The only obvious omission from the top to tail offer is a specific CRM database, however IBM Experienceone is compatible with most of the leading solutions, including those of its arch rivals. This leads to the question, could a CRM be next on the company’s shopping list?

As well as on desktop and server equipment, Experienceone analytics will also be available through apps for iOS and Android.

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IBM Goes BlueMix

IBM has put together a vast array of hosted cloud services, and now it has a single location to offer them for sale.

At IBM Cloud online marketplace, that went live on Monday, enterprises can find the full range of IBM’s offerings behind a single gateway.

“So many of our customers want to build new cloud-based, front-end systems, but they want to tie them into their back-end infrastructure. We’re delivering a whole set of integration components and control services to do the connection, and monitor and control what is taking place,” said Steve Mills, IBM senior vice president and group executive for software and systems.

The marketplace has more than 100 hosted IBM applications, as well as middleware components from IBM’s Bluemix platform as a service (PaaS). It also serves as a portal to IBM’s SoftLayer infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and houses a collection of services from IBM partners.

“It’s an open platform. It supports all the popular application development tools and structures. So it’s not uniquely IBM. There’s a lot of open source and partners,” Mills said. In addition to IBM’s own offerings, other services will be offered on the site by SendGrid, Zend, Redis Labs and other IBM partners.

IBM is banking heavily on the cloud. The company’s revenue has been declining lately, due in part to sagging hardware sales. The cloud is likely to be a good place to look for more money: Gartner expects 80 percent of organizations to use cloud services in some form by the end of 2014.

Although IBM got a late start in the cloud, at least compared with rivals Amazon and Microsoft, it’s aggressively repositioning itself as a one-stop cloud services company. It generated $4.4 billion in cloud-related revenue in 2013 and has made a number of additional investments in the area as well.

In January, the company announced it would invest $1.2 billion into expanding its SoftLayer cloud service, which it acquired last year for $2 billion.

It is also investing $1 billion in the effort to adapt its middleware software as cloud services, part of the Bluemix offering.

The new online marketplace ties together a number of these initiatives from IBM within a single portal. It can be accessed from desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones, and it can customize the service offerings based on the user’s needs.

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Heartbleed Hits Oracle

Oracle issued a comprehensive list of its software that may or may not be impacted by the OpenSSL (secure sockets layer) vulnerability known as Heartbleed, while warning that no fixes are yet available for some likely affected products.

The list includes well over 100 products that appear to be in the clear, either because they never used the version of OpenSSL reported to be vulnerable to Heartbleed, or because they don’t use OpenSSL at all.

However, Oracle is still investigating whether another roughly 20 products, including MySQL Connector/C++, Oracle SOA Suite and Nimbula Director, are vulnerable.

Oracle determined that seven products are vulnerable and is offering fixes. These include Communications Operation Monitor, MySQL Enterprise Monitor, MySQL Enterprise Server 5.6, Oracle Communications Session Monitor, Oracle Linux 6, Oracle Mobile Security Suite and some Solaris 11.2 implementations.

Another 14 products are likely to be vulnerable, but Oracle doesn’t have fixes for them yet, according to the post. These include BlueKai, Java ME and MySQL Workbench.

Users of Oracle’s growing family of cloud services may also be able to breath easy. “It appears that both externally and internally (private) accessible applications hosted in Oracle Cloud Data Centers are currently not at risk from this vulnerability,” although Oracle continues to investigate, according to the post.

Heartbleed, which was revealed by researchers last week, can allow attackers who exploit it to steal information on systems thought to be protected by OpenSSL encryption. A fix for the vulnerable version of OpenSSL has been released and vendors and IT organizations are scrambling to patch their products and systems.

Observers consider Heartbleed one of the most serious Internet security vulnerabilities in recent times.

Meanwhile, this week Oracle also shipped 104 patches as part of its regular quarterly release.

The patch batch includes security fixes for Oracle database 11g and 12c, Fusion Middleware 11g and 12c, Fusion Applications, WebLogic Server and dozens of other products. Some 37 patches target Java SE alone.

A detailed rundown of the vulnerabilities’ relative severity has been posted to an official Oracle blog.

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SkySQL Joins IBM On SQL Merger

SkySQL has announced a line of MariaDB products that combine NoSQL and SQL technology, offering users the ability to handle large unstructured data sets alongside traditional database features to ensure data consistency.

Available immediately, MariaDB Enterprise 2 and MariaDB Enterprise Cluster 2 are based on the code used in the firm’s MariaDB 10 database server, which it also released today.

According to SkySQL, the availability of an enterprise grade SQL database system with NoSQL interoperability will be a game changer for developers building revenue generating applications and database administrators in charge of large, complex environments.

The two new products have been developed with support from other partners in the open source community, including Red Hat, IBM and Google, according to the firm, and are aimed at giving IT managers more options for managing large volumes of data.

In fact, Red Hat will use MariaDB Enterprise 2 as the default database for its enterprise customers, while Google has also moved large parts of its infrastructure to MariaDB, according to Dion Cornett, VP of Global Sales for SkySQL .

Cornett said that customers have been using a wide variety of databases over the past few years in order to meet the diverse requirements of applications.

“The types of applications have evolved over time, and the challenge we now have today is that people have different IT stack structures, and trying to integrate all that has been very challenging and required lots of custom code to be created. What we’re doing with MariaDB is introduce an array of features to combine the best of both worlds,” he said.

The features are designed to allow developers and database administrators to take many different data structures and integrate them and use them in a cohesive application, in the same way that standard database tools presently allow.

These include the Connect Storage Engine, which enables access to a wide variety of file formats such as XML and CSV files, and the ability to run familiar SQL commands against that data.

A key feature is dynamic columns, which enables MariaDB to “smartly interpret” incoming data and adapt it to the data structure that best fits, according to Cornett.

“At a technical level what you’re actually looking at are files within the cells of information that can vary in size, which is not a capability you’ve traditionally had in databases and that flexibility is a big leap forward,” he said.

The new MariaDB products can also plug into the Apache Cassandra storage engine, which can take a columnar data store and read or write against it like it is a traditional SQL table.

An example of how MariaDB Enterprise 2 might be used is if a service provider has a large-scale video server and wants to combine that with billing information, Cornett said.

“The customer’s video history and what they’re consuming could be very unstructured, but the billing structure will be very fixed, and it has been something of a challenge to bring the two of those together up to this point,” he explained.

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vmWare Buys Airwatch

VMware will buy mobile management and security startup outfit Airwatch for $1.54billion.

The firm announced today that the deal has been approved by both companies’ boards and is forecast to close by the end of this quarter.

The deal will see VMware, which also announced estimated revenue of $1.48bn for the fourth quarter of 2013, pay $1.175bn in cash and $365m in installment payments.

Airwatch has nine offices worldwide with a workforce of 1,600 people and lists over 10,000 global customers.

The acquisition, which will help redefine VMware’s product portfolio and bring it more up to date with the industry’s threat landscape, will see the integration of Airwatch staff into the company’s End-User Computing Group, with the team working from its Atlanta base. VMware said it will continue to answer directly to Airwatch founder and CEO John Marshall, who will report to ex-Intel executive and VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger.

VMware EVP and GM of the End-User Computing group Sanjay Poonen said that the company plans to expand Airwatch’s Atlanta offices to become the centre of its mobile operations.

“Our vision is to provide a secure virtual workspace that allows end users to work at the speed of life,” he said. “The combination of Airwatch and VMware will enable us to deliver unprecedented value to our customers and partners across their desktop and mobile environments.”

Almost a year ago, VMWare announced a two percent increase in quarterly profits despite an impressive 22 percent increase in sales, and announced 900 job cuts.

The visualization specialist is one many firms to acquire security companies over the past year. Advanced threat specialist Fireeye announced plans to buy end-point protection firm Mandiant earlier in January for $1bn.

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Is SAP Searching In The Clouds?

Esoteric business software maker, which no one is really certain what it does, SAP is debating whether to accelerate moving more of its business to the cloud.

The move would be a change in strategy which might initially have only a small impact on its sales. Co-chief executive Jim Hagemann-Snabe said the change would generate more sales by 2017 particularly in markets like the US where there is a big push onto the cloud.

Talking to a Morgan Stanley investor conference this morning, Hagemann-Snabe said that this would have impact on the 2015 level, I don’t expect enormous impact but it would have some impact because you are delaying some revenues. In the long term however it makes a lot of sense, which is not the sort of thing people expect from SAP.

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SAP To Stop Offering SME

The maker of expensive esoteric software which no-one is really sure what it does, SAP has decided to pull the plug on its offering for small businesses. Business weekly Wirtschaftswoche said SAP would stop the development of a software dubbed Business By Design, although existing customers will be able to continue to use it.

SAP insists that development capacity for Business By Design was being reduced, but that the product was not being shut down. Business by Design was launched in 2010 and was supposed to generate $1 billion of revenue. The product, which cost roughly 3 billion euros to develop, currently has only 785 customers and is expected to generate no more than 23 million euros in sales this year.

The Wirtschaftswoche report said that ever since the SAP product’s launch, customers had complained about technical issues and the slow speed of the software.

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Oracle Goes After SAP’s HANA

Oracle has upped its game in its fight against SAP HANA, having added in-memory processing to its Oracle 12c database management system, which it claims will speed up queries by 100 times.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison revealed the update on Sunday evening during his opening keynote at the Oracle Openworld show in San Francisco.

The in-memory option for Oracle Database 12c is designed to ramp up the speeds of data queries – and will also give Oracle a new weapon in the fight against SAP’s rival HANA in-memory system.

“When you put data in memory, one of the reasons you do that is to make the system go faster,” Ellison said. “It will make queries go faster, 100 times faster. You can load the same data into the identical machines, and it’s 100 times faster, you get results at the speed of thought.”

Ellison was keen to allay concerns that these faster query times would have a negative impact on transactions.

“We didn’t want to make transactions go slower with adding and changing data in the database. We figured out a way to speed up query processing and at least double your transaction processing rates,” he said.

In traditional databases, data is stored in rows, for example a row of sales orders, Ellison explained. These types of row format databases were designed to operate at high speeds when processing a few rows that each contain lots of columns. More recently, a new format was proposed to store data in columns rather than rows to speed up query processing.

Oracle plans to store the data in both formats simultaneously, according to Ellison, so transactions run faster in the row format and analytics run faster in column format.

“We can process data at ungodly speeds,” Ellison claimed. As evidence of this, Oracle demoed the technology, showing seven billion rows could be queried per second via in-memory compared to five million rows per second in a traditional database.

The new approach also allows database administrators to speed up their workloads by removing the requirement for analytics indexes.

“If you create a table in Oracle today, you create the table but also decide which columns of the table you’ll create indexes for,” Ellison explained. “We’re replacing the analytics indexes with the in-memory option. Let’s get rid of analytic indexes and replace them with the column store.”

Ellison added that firms can choose to have just part of the database for in-memory querying. “Hot data can be in DRAM, you can have some in flash, some on disk,” he noted. “Data automatically migrates from disk into flash into DRAM based on your access patterns. You only have to pay by capacity at the cost of disk.”

Firms wanting to take advantage of this new in-memory option can do so straightaway, according to Ellison, with no need for changes to functions, no loading or reloading of data, and no data migration. Costs were not disclosed.

And for those firms keen to rush out and invest in new hardware to take advantage of this new in-memory option, Ellison took the wraps off the M6-32, dubbed the Big Memory Machine. According to Ellison, the M6-32 has twice the memory, can process data much faster and costs less than a third of IBM’s biggest comparable machine, making it ideal for in-memory databases.

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Oracle Issues Massive Security Update

Oracle has issued its critical patch update advisory for July, plugging a total of 89 security holes across its product portfolio.

The fixes focus mainly on remotely exploitable vulnerabilities in four widely used products, with 27 fixes issued for the Oracle Database, Fusion Middleware, the Oracle and Sun Systems Product Suite and the MySQL database.

Out of the 89 security fixes included with this update, the firm said six are for Oracle Database, with one of the vulnerabilities being remotely exploitable without authentication.

Oracle revealed that the highest CVSS Base Score for these database vulnerabilities is 9.0, a score related to vulnerability CVE-2013-3751, which affects the XML Parser on Oracle Database 11.2.0.2 and 11.2.0.3.

A further 21 patched vulnerabilities listed in Oracle’s Critical Patch Update are for Oracle Fusion Middleware; 16 of these vulnerabilities are remotely exploitable without authentication, with the highest CVSS Base Score being 7.5.

As for the Oracle and Sun Systems Products Suite, these products received a total of 16 security fixes, eight of which were also remotely exploitable without authentication, with a maximum CVSS Base Score of 7.8.

“As usual, Oracle recommends that customers apply this Critical Patch Update as soon as possible,” Oracle’s director of Oracle Software Security Assurance Eric Maurice wrote in a blog post.

Craig Young, a security researcher at Tripwire commented on the Oracle patch, saying the “drumbeat of critical patches” is more than alarming because the vulnerabilities are frequently reported by third parties who presumably do not have access to full source code.

“It’s also noteworthy that […] every Oracle CPU release this year has plugged dozens of vulnerabilities,” he added. “By my count, Oracle has already acknowledged and fixed 343 security issues in 2013. In case there was any doubt, this should be a big red flag to end users that Oracle’s security practices are simply not working.”

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