A week ago Oracle announced at OpenWorld their new virtualization solution, unimaginatively called Oracle VM. I can see why Oracle is launching such a product. After all, customers have been adopting virtualization enthusiastically and Oracle has been extremely slow to adopt to the new reality. In fact, until last week, Oracle would not provide support to customers unable to reproduce a problem on a non-virtualized environment. That was a pretty lame policy, considering that most enterprise customers have ben using virtualization products for years.
While this announcement doesn’t help VMWare customers at all, since that environment is still unsupported, at least it gives them an option and it is a free one, which is always nice. However, many questions remain. The most important is obviously performance. Oracle is quick to point out that their product is three times more efficient than comparable solutions. Note that they say efficient, not faster. What does that mean? Who are they comparing to? Nobody knows. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, we all know that Oracle is primarily a well oiled marketing machine that displays little respect for the truth. Remember Oracle’s Unbreakable campaign? Enough said, I rest my case.
For Oracle customers, this new virtualization solution may translate into some savings which in turn may help make Oracle’s value proposition more attractive. That was probably why Oracle released this product in the first place, and it makes a lot of sense. The software industry is very competitive and that is driving prices down. By delivering a relatively simple piece of software for free that can help customers save money by impacting someone else’s business, they can protect their own products. That is a smart move, at least in the short term.