theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante, are chatting it up with top tech athletes as we broadcast live this week from Oracle OpenWorld 2013, in San Francisco. Streaming from the Moscone Center, Furrier and Vellante provide exclusive interviews, debating the hot topics of the day and analyzing the trends in the industry.

Ray Wang, a regular guest and also Researcher and Co-Founder with Constellation Research, attempted to answer the battery of questions Furrier and Vellante kept shooting at him.

First of all, they wanted to find out his impressions of the current event, and his take on Oracle’s new path. It is Wang’s impression that “they are trying to go for something different, focusing on innovation and incorporating Big Data, social and mobile, while trying to weave the database back into hardware.”

On Oracle’s ability to innovate + appeal

If we are to go by Wang’s own report, Oracle’s typical “over emphasis on hardware marketing and revisionist history on cloud adoption” tends to bore the audiences. Wang certainly didn’t hold back while recounting previous Oracle events… However, he seems less harsh with OpenWorld 2013.

Going into detail, Ray Wang pointed out that “Oracle is a traditional Red Stack. They are the folks that came up with the database, did middleware, did applications, and who represent the core of the Oracle base.”

The other sets of customers came in through acquisitions (i.e. by accident), when Oracle was looking for innovation. They sought the best-of-breed sets of applications, and suddenly there were a lot of companies commoditized into the Oracle infrastructure. “The question is whether or not Oracle can keep innovating at the same pace,” said Wang.

• Can Oracle keep pace with internal innovation?

As analysts, Vellante and Wang talked about Oracle’s strategy for development. They are not the best-of-breed in servers, storage or apps. They are best of breed in database. Comparing for instance IBM and Oracle, Wang noted that “Oracle has a high volume/high value strategy, while IBM has a high margin/high value strategy, which is a different game.”

Wang described IBM as deep, customized, able to go best in class, and Oracle as commoditizing innovation and infrastructure in the stack with Oracle Red Stack.

“One of the ‘crown jewels’ is what’s inside Sun labs, but the acquisition has been a drag on Oracle’s earnings,” said Wang. As he wrote on his article, “for Oracle to win the innovation battle, the company must win over the mind share of the Oracle customers by acquisition.”

See Wang’s entire segment below.