As the ironically named “Oracle OpenWorld 2013” looms, the big question is: How much longer can Oracle ignore the huge changes that are happening in the IT industry? And will Larry Ellison allow any concessions to the present realities of cloud, mobile, and especially Open Systems to creep into this year’s conference.

Oracle provides strong products and customer support, but at a high price in licensing fees that can leave customers gasping. It is unquestionably this dominant player in relational databases. But that technology is increasingly being left behind in this world of Big Data, Hadoop, and NoSQL. Oracle’s proprietary, closed technology, and its lock-in approach to its customer base, along with its monolithic, vertically integrated technology, is a sharp contrast to the horizontal build-out approach based on Open Systems that typifies the new reality in IT.

TheCUBE will be at Oracle Openworld again this year. To find out what Oracle is doing and get the story behind the story, watch SiliconAngle.TV for live interviews with key players and Wikibon analysts, including CEO David Vellante and CTO david Floyer, as well as SiliconAngle CEO John Furrier.

Oracle vs IBM

That contrast is exemplified by the comparison between Oracle and another major vendor with a much longer history, IBM. While Oracle has so far done its best to ignore the new IT realities, IBM is embracing them wholeheartedly, as demonstrated by its announcement Tuesday of a $1 billion investment in Linux. And this is the latest in a string of Open Systems announcements IBM has made this year so far.

At IBM Edge last June, Ambuj Goyal, head of IBM’s Storage & Networking Group, said that no one company, not even IBM, can do everything, and IBM has to partner with other companies to develop the products and systems it needs to prosper in this new environment. That obviously was not an empty statement, given the announcements since then. So obviously old vendors can learn new approaches and adapt to new market conditions.

In contrast, Ellison’s unspoken philosophy is “We can do it all, or if not we can buy the company that is doing it.” Oracle’s very unfriendly takeover of Peoplesoft a few years ago, and its purchase of Sun Microsystems, are expressions of that philosophy. Oracle’s official response to server virtualization, which until this year was, “Don’t do it to our products, and if you do you can only do it with Oracle’s hypervisor,” is further evidence of that philosophy.

Certainly Oracle today does do what practitioners report is an outstanding job of supporting customers who virtualize huge Oracle databases and ERP systems using VMware, Hyper-V, and other third-party hypervisors. Basically it was forced into this by customers. And nobody is saying that those huge Oracle systems at the core of many medium-to-very large enterprises are going away any time soon. But RDBMS is characterized by rear window analysis — what has happened in the markets — while Big Data analysis using open platforms starting with Hadoop, and NoSQL or NewSQL databases, support predictive analysis. That can be very valuable to users.

Another symptom of this attitude is that so far Oracle has done little with mobile. While that is not a core issue for the company in the same sense as unstructured data and predictive analysis — and the huge licensing cost differential between Oracle and Hadoop — are, it is symptomatic. And certainly end users would like to have access to analysis of Oracle data on their tablets. Another interesting factoid comes from the recent Tableau User Conference. Sybase, HP, and IBM were all among the Tableau partners with booths on the vendor floor. Oracle was not.

Oracle Losing its Mojo

Those of us who were around in the 1980s remember when Oracle, Sybase, and Informix were cutting edge companies. Now Oracle seems tired, increasingly a legacy vendor, like those old flat-file database companies that it replaced. And the big long-term danger for Oracle is that if it does not move forward it inevitably will face the same fate as that earlier generation.

So the big question as Oracle OpenWorld opens is will this be the year that Oracle moves into the future, or will it be another celebration of closed systems, structured data, and monolithic control that sounds more like 1993 than 2013. And what strategic investment decisions will its customers make as a result?