Photo courtesy of Oracle

Oracle’s OpenWorld 2012 kicked off last Sunday and will run through until October 4th in San Francisco.

Oracle President Mark Hurd hosted the keynote event on the second day of OracleWorld.  The keynote, titled Shifting Complexity, tackles how the company’s holistic, aggregate strategy for product innovation can make things simpler for customers.  Hurd reiterated Oracle’s four-strategic pillars which are: Best-of-breed provided at every layer of the stack; Vertically integrated pieces built into differentiated solutions such as Oracle engineered systems; Oracle Fusion cloud applications that are modular and can be delivered in a hybrid model that is either on-premises or in the cloud; and Industry-optimized technology that helps customers solve problems so they can become more efficient and save money.  He also pointed out that what Oracle offers is the best for their customers as they modern, modular applications for the cloud and a complete offering that includes software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Other highlights from OracleWorld came from our very own SiliconANGLE Founder and CEO John Furrier and Wikibon Co-founder Dave Vellante, who are covering the event on theCube – SiliconANGLE.tv’s exclusive coverage of the event.

During the second day of the event, Furrier and Vellante had the pleasure of interviewing Vu Nguyen – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Infrastructure Engineer, who talked about the importance of the exploration of Mars in understanding the Earth’s geology.  Contrary to what most people believe, drastic changes happen in Mars in just a year as they’ve noticed changes in the landscape and the possible existence of liquid components in the planet that cause changes in the terrain that’s why the Mars Curiosity Project is so important.

Because of the many missions in space, NASA is constantly faced with the problem of data storage, as more and more data are being sent to them and the fact that they hold on to every piece of data they receive.  For example with the Curiosity Project, they do not discard any data because they never know whether anything will be considered important later on, and they have numerous analysts and scientists that look at their gathered data to check it.  They download data in real-time and have it storage where it will be ready for scientists and analysts to use, while older data goes into “active archive” so it will always be readily available for use.  To watch the full interview, click here or see below (more day 2 highlights after the clip).

Another highlight from day 2 at OOW was Furrier and Vellante’s interview with Rich Petersen, Director of Software Marketing for SanDisk Enterprise Storage Solutions. Petersen talked about how his company image, emphasizing that it’s not just about flash technology, as most people think, stating that SanDisk has a very active and vibrant enterprise business that centers on flash technology.  They develop both hardware and software solutions that leverage enterprise flash to reduce IO latency which is one of the key enablers to increase performance and scalability for databases, enterprise applications and virtualization environments.

Vellante mentioned that Oracle is moving in on flash and asked how it affects SanDisk.  Petersen stated that there are many ways flash is used to reduce IO latency, and their approach is to enable flash to act as a cache within the IO data path of the operating system itself.  He explains that SanDisk’s role in all of this is that, even if you’re running an Oracle database on Linux, /Windows server, or even VMs, you can accelerate the performance and scalability of the application by reducing the latency through the use of flash technology as a server attached cache.  To watch the full interview, click here or see below.

Furrier and Vellante also got a chance to sit down with DataStax CEO Billy Bosworth, who talked about their $25 million Series C funding led by  Meritech Capital Partners with the participation of Lightspeed Venture Partners and Crosslink Capital.  Bosworth stated that the funding will be used for their company’s growth, as they have a lot of customers to service as well as for expansion in sales and marketing.

Furrier asked Bosworth his view on the explosion of big data, and how DataStax fits into the competing market of big data.  Bosworth stated that they believed from the start that big data was something that would create a huge wave or opportunity for a lot of players.  As for their success, they attribute it to the fact that they allow the open source to be adopted in a way to facilitate education and they make people aware of the commercial background of the market.  To watch the full interview, click here or see below.

To watch SIliconANGLE’s live coverage and ongoing analysis of Oracle’s OpenWorld 2012, visit SiliconANGLE.tv or The SiliconANGLE Network on YouTube.