Many no-shows at Oracle show

A record 40,000 people were expected at the annual Oracle OpenWorld Trade show in San Francisco. A record 15,000 or so didn't show up. Like the Comdex show in Las Vegas two weeks ago, the annual Oracle show fell victim to a bad economy, reduced IT spending, corporate cutbacks on travel and continued jitters among business travelers about air travel in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.

In stark contrast to the past several Oracle shows, isles were sparsely populated. And even the star-studded line-up of keynote speakers such as Craig Barrett of Intel, Michael Capellas of Compaq, Scott McNealy of Sun, Marc Andreessen of Netscape, and Larry Ellison of Oracle didn't pull in the crowd Oracle had hoped for.

Barrett opened the trade show with a detailed outline for Intel's "macroprocessing" architecture that will transform the way companies build and run their computing and communications infrastructures.

Macroprocessing is based on the idea of leveraging the advantages of inexpensive, but powerful microprocessors in large-scale enterprise solutions. "From one design approach, information technologists are able to build an unlimited number of solutions to meet their specific data center requirements. Today's competitive realities and challenges of e-business drive corporations to adapt their compute models. Macroprocessing allows companies to shift from proprietary systems to open standards."

During an on-stage demonstration, Intel officials showed Oracle 9i Unified Messaging technology running on clusters of Xeon processor-based servers. The demonstration showed a highly scalable solution that allows for integrated e-mail and messaging. The combination of these technologies allows users to access, retrieve and manage any data from any device any time from anywhere in the world through a Web browser and standard telephone, thus lowering costs and increasing reliability and functionality.

Barrett also gave the first public demonstration of a system built around the forthcoming 64 bit "McKinley" processor running Oracle 9i Real Application Clusters. The chip, a second-generation Itanium processor, will become available in mid 2002.

"Technology is not slowing and continues to be driven by Moore's Law, increasing bandwidth, and a growing network. The Internet will be the center of commerce, communications, research, information and entertainment, and companies must invest in Internet technologies that are cost-effective and grow with the businesses needs," Barrett said.

He added, "The Internet is evolving to a services model, where applications interact with each other on any device using Internet standards-based infrastructure. Companies need to be ready to fully realize the capabilities of the Internet through macroprocessing." Barrett explained how Intel's products and architectures are focused on providing the fundamental computing and communications building blocks of the Internet.

HP used the Oracle show to launch a new line of "blade" computers, systems that fit on a PCI card. The compact design allows many such servers to fit in a very small space as the servers can be stacked like books on a shelf and could thus replace less-efficient racks of machines and tangles of cable now standard in many server sites.

HP will compete with companies such as OmniCluster and its Windows and Linux-based SlotServer products. HP is the first major computer maker to enter the field of blade servers that IDC estimates could reach about $ 4.5 billion by 2005. HP's blades costing around $ 1,925 per server, would be a strong opening entry in a market. Compaq, Dell and IBM all plan to announce blade products next year.