A few highlights from my week that didn’t grow into blog posts of their own…
Oracle: complete, open and integrated
I was at an Oracle event earlier this week when I heard the following comment that amused me somewhat (non-attributed to protect the not-so-innocent):
“Oracle likes to say they are complete, open and integrated – and they are:
- Complete – as in ‘we have a long price list’.
- Open – as in ‘we’re not arrogant enough to think you buy everything from us’.
- Integrated – as in ‘if we own both sides of the connection we’ll sell you the integration’.”
I don’t have enough experience of working with Oracle to know how true that is, but it certainly fits the impression I have of the company… I wonder what the Microsoft equivalent would be…
The rise of the Personal Cloud
I’ve been catching up with reading the paper copy of Computing that arrives ever fortnight (and yes, I do prefer the dead tree edition – I wouldn’t generally read the online content without it). One of the main features on 22 March was about the rise of the personal cloud – a contentious topic among some, but one to ignore at your peril as I highlighted in a recent post.
One quote I particularly liked from the article was this one:
“The personal cloud isn’t so much the death of the PC as its demotion. The PC has become just another item in a growing arsenal of access devices.”
Now all we need is for a few more IT departments to wake up to this, and architect their enterprise to deliver device-agnostic services…
What’s app?
In another Computing article, I was reading about some of the technologies that Barclays is implementing and it was interesting to read COO Shaygan Kheradpir’s view on apps:
“Many […] tasks that happen on the front-line are […] app-oriented […].
And what are apps? They are deep and narrow. They’re not like PC applications, which are broad and shallow. You want apps to do one, often complex, task.”
Sounds like Unix to me! (but also pretty much nails why mobile apps work so well in small packages.)