@ Oracle OpenWorld: Dell glosses over mobility

SAN FRANCISCO — Kicking off the last major day of Oracle Corp.’s OpenWorld, Dell Inc. CEO Michael Dell gave a general update of the 26-year-old company and invited partners from Zynga Game Network Inc. and FedEx Corp. to join him on stage for a bright and early keynote Wednesday.
With a current market cap of almost $23.8 billion, Dell now has at least 100,000 employees — roughly the same size as Oracle — thanks to an average growth of 20% over the past two years, Dell said.
Any mobile related thoughts or plans, while mentioned early in his keynote, were basically glossed over and left hanging in the air. Dell spent roughly a minute on the topic of mobility overall.
He briefly mentioned the company’s Streak tablet, which comes in at five inches. Dell also announced plans to launch a second Android-based tablet with a 7-inch touchscreen, but gave no further details about the device’s specs, availability or pricing.
From Dell’s perspective, mobile is new and far from being its bread and butter anytime soon. After all, the company has shipped 15 million servers over the last decade. That type of movement has been revved up of late by the likes of Zynga.
Introducing Zynga as the fastest-growing online business today, Dell invited Cadir Lee, CTO of the company behind Mafia Wars and Farmville, on stage to share in the light.
To help highlight how much its growth is driving server demand, Lee said in some weeks the San Francisco-based company will need to add as many as 1,000 servers to its arsenal in a single week. That’s a lot of virtual farming and gangster pretending.
Moving on from customer praise, Dell also made sure to talk about the company’s 15-year-long partnership with Oracle and Dell’s recent improvements to Oracle deployed services.
“A lot has changed at Dell in the past year,” he said. The company’s commercial business grew 28% and its server, storage and servers business grew more than 50% in the last year. It also has $13 billion in cash reserves and investments.
“Our industry is really at an inflection point,” he concluded.
Ellison wraps it up
In a recurring theme throughout the conference, mobile was essentially left out of Oracle CEO and founder Larry Ellison’s afternoon keynote.
Indeed, Ellison only took the stage after a video ran, which showed his America’s Cup victory.
Wrapping up a series of product announcements made throughout the conference, including a refined roadmap for Java, Ellison tried to summarize the week’s events, while highlighting a couple major themes.
“Our strategy is to take a lot of separate pieces that our customers used to buy as components …and do pre-integration, and deliver you complete working systems,” Ellison said.
He ended his talk with Exalogic Elastic Cloud, also known as the “cloud in a box,” which combines physical hardware and software all brought together by Oracle, rather than piecing together solutions from multiple suppliers.
“This machine delivers enormous performance gains and cost savings,” Ellison said.
Oracle Fusion Middleware, which this product falls under, is “the largest engineering project in Oracle’s history,” he said.