Good-bye Oracle

Tomorrow will be my last day at Oracle. It’s been a great 5 years. By virtue of my position as architect for the Application and Middleware Management part of Oracle Enterprise Manager, I got to work with people all over the Enterprise Manager team as well as many other groups, whose products we are managing: from WebLogic to Fusion Apps, from Exalogic to Oracle’s Public Cloud and many others.

I was hired for, and initially focused on, defining and building Oracle’s application management capabilities. This was done via a mix of organic development and targeted acquisitions (Moniforce, ClearApp, Amberpoint…). The exercise was made even more interesting by acquisitions in other parts of the company (especially BEA) which redefined the scope of what we had to manage.

The second half of my time at Oracle was mostly focused on Cloud Computing. Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, which we released a year ago at Oracle Open World 2011, introduced Private Cloud support with IaaS (including multi-VM assemblies) and DBaaS. Last week, we release EMCC 12c Release 2 which, among other things, adds support for Java PaaS. I was supposed to present on this, and demo the Java service, at Oracle Open World next week. If you’re attending, make sure to hear my friends Dhruv Gupta and Fred Carter deliver that session, titled “Platform as a Service: Taking Enterprise Clouds Beyond Virtualization” on Wednesday October 3 at 3:30 in Moscone West 3018.

I also got to work on the Oracle Public Cloud, in which Enterprise Manager plays a huge role. I was responsible for the integration of new Cloud service types with Enterprise Manager, which gave me a great view of what’s in the Oracle Public Cloud pipeline. Larry Ellison has promised to show a lot more next week at Oracle Open World, stay tuned for that. The breadth and speed with which Oracle has now embraced Cloud (both public and private) is impressive. Part of Oracle’s greatness is how quickly its leadership can steer the giant ship. I am honored to have been part of that, in the context of the move to Cloud Computing, and I will remember fondly my years in Redwood Shores and my friends there.

I am taking next week off. On Monday October 8, I am starting in a new and exciting job, still in the Cloud Computing space. That’s a topic for another post.