SAN FRANCISCO—Last week: iOS 7. This week: JavaOne. Both Apple and Oracle are huge companies, but the first, iOS 7, offers a closed garden focused on mobility. The other, Java, is an open platform that’s designed for all apps great and small—from mobile to the biggest possible enterprise servers.
(Of course, Java doesn’t run everywhere. The most obvious exception to “Write Once, Run Everywhere” is Apple’s iOS.)
What to expect at JavaOne and Oracle OpenWorld?
In the Java part of this week’s over-the-top extravaganza, you are going to hear about cloud, cloud, cloud. The IBM keynote by John Duimovich will be about open cloud stacks and Platform-as-a-Service. The Oracle keynote, by my own friend Cameron Purdy, will be about the Cloud Application Foundation. I’m looking forward to the keynote by Geoff Lees from Freescale Semiconductor, about the Internet of Things—which, of course, is enabled by the cloud.
Under the big tent (the Oracle OpenWorld part of this week’s San Francisco festivities), the topics are more diverse. Larry Ellison will talk about the America’s Cup sailing race. And the cloud.
Noriyuki Toyoki from Fujitsu will talk about big servers, like its impressive M10, which runs Unix on SPARC chips. Microsoft will talk about the cloud. Intel will talk about Big Data. EMC will talk about storage.
Cloud. Big Data. Big servers. That’s going to be the chatter at JavaOne and Oracle OpenWorld. While there’s certainly going to be lots of mobility, it’s nice to spend a week digging deep into the enterprise, forsaking gossip about Internet radio, skeuomorphism, and in-app advertising.
Wait a minute. Who am I kidding? We’ll be talking about that too.
Alan Zeichick, founding editor of SD Times, is principal analyst of Camden Associates.
