Oracle news: Indian expansion and Sun Ray update

New guidelines issued by the Indian government have raised the threshold for public shareholding in listed companies to 25%. Speculation around the new legislation turned to Oracle, naturally, as a major player in India.

The new guidelines, however, will not currently affect Oracle Financial Services, its Indian arm. Oracle’s public holding is less than 25%, which means that the company will not need to delist its Indian arm; at least, not in the near future, anyway.

Having said this, Oracle is currently in talks to offload up to 9% of Oracle Financial Services. Currently, it holds 80.47%. The funds raised by this, Oracle spokespeople have said, will be used for expansion and acquisitions in India.

And expand Oracle will. Last month, reports came in that Oracle had already acquired 3.5 lakh square feet of commercial space at Kalyani Magnum, JP Nagar. Never a company to be left behind in its quest for market dominance, Oracle purchased the space as fellow IT services provider Capgemini signed for 2.5 lakh sqft of office space at the Summit in Brigade Metropolis, which could house 2,000 employees.

Whilst it expands in the East, Oracle has been working on improving its Sun offering too. This week, Oracle unveiled the new versions of its Sun Ray Client and the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure software it runs on. This is the first time the products have been revamped since the Sun takeover.

Wim Coekaerts, Oracle senior vice president for Linux and virtualisation engineering, said:
“Oracle is committed to helping customers leverage the power of virtualisation through the most complete and integrated portfolio, spanning desktop, server, storage and middleware.”

Linux thrives in economic downturn

A recent survey by Novell and IDC demonstrates that more than 50% of IT executives are planning to accelerate Linux adoption this year.

The research claims that the global downturn has encouraged the sudden interest in open source, improving business for Linux.

The survey of over 300 IT professionals in companies of more than 100 staff found that 72% are either deciding whether or not to increase their adoption of Linux on the server, or have already decided to do so. 68% expressed the same interest in the desktop service.

The reasons given are similar to what is driving all businesses in the current climate; cutting costs. Respondents who said they were reluctant to move over to open source gave a lack of application support and difficulties operating with Windows and other environments as reasons not to use Linux.

Markus Rex, senior vice president for open platform solutions at Novell, said: "The feedback gleaned from this survey confirms our belief that, as organisations fight to cut costs and find value in this tough economic climate, Linux adoption will accelerate.”

Following the hit of the credit crunch, Linux were quick to advocate their services, which sparked a backlash from critics who predicted the complete collapse of open source.

It would seem, however, that Linux was right. Further, it would seem that open source is growing with outsourcing; the uptake of Linux is most popular in the Asia Pacific region. Of the 134 respondents from the region, 73% expressed an interest in increasing the adoption of Linux, compared to 53% of respondents overall.

Microsoft invests in skills while UK battles recession

While Oracle’s OUG held their annual conference this week, Microsoft has been pushing out new products and investing in European skills. On Tuesday, Microsoft announced its investment of a further £4million in NGOs running community skills training projects in 30 countries across Europe. The investment is part of the company’s drive to create employment opportunities for young unemployed people, the older generation and people with disabilities.

Following on from this, Microsoft have backed the housing of a £20million cloud computing datacentre in Inverness, run by Scottish IT firm Alchemy Plus.

Also this week, Microsoft has launched the latest beta of Windows Vista Service Pack Two (SP2), which became available on Thursday. The code will be available to who join Microsoft’s Customer Preview Program (CPP).

Mike Nash, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Windows Product Management, said: "The CPP is intended for technology enthusiasts, developers and IT pros who would like to test SP2 in their environments and with their applications prior to final release." On Wednesday, Microsoft released Open XML Document Viewer, a plug-in working within Firefox to allow open XML documents to be viewed within the browser, and which can be used on Windows and Linux plaforms without installing Office.

On the same day, Microsoft announced that it has halved the number of criteria LARs must meet to hit rebate targets, meaning that partners will earn less on volume licensing deals. The new programme will come into effect on 1 January 2009. Simon Aldous, UK partner group manager at Microsoft. “We are simplifying the scheme, halving the number of metrics on which rebates are paid.”

Outside of Microsoft, investment in IT is proving to be a popular choice amongst some businesses in an effort to beat the credit crunch. Red Hat, the IT services provider, reports that it has had a high demand for Linux since the recession began, with its revenues growing 30% year-on-year. Chief executive Jim Whitehurst said: "The downturn is good for open source software. We have an embarrassment of opportunities. In a difficult economy our message sells well."

It isn’t just IT firms reporting the financial benefits of investing in IT. Insurance firm Kennedys and Rowanmoor Pensions are now using the cloud computing model of online services to virtualise its IT operations, and claiming to have saved £350,000 in the process.

All this in one week just makes you realise that even during an economic downtown industry development and the IT market is still going strong. CIO magazine said that now is the time for CIOs to prove their worth which means there really will be some winners in a recession.

Inatech has been working with businesses to find these solutions; CIOs struggling to identify core IT needs for their company should explore the priorities to maximise customer relationships and increase efficiency.