Healthcare Matters

The topic? What difference does it make? It surely doesn’t seem to matter to Oracle’s enigmatic CEO. If Oracle isn’t in control of the message or leading with the technology, it’s all crap, regardless of what it is, according to Larry Ellison. That is, of course, until Oracle has it. Then, Larry switches from his befuddled mode to industry sage.

First, his big bet on Java, then numerous high profile interviews debunking cloud computing and then his personal pox on multi-tenant database architectures (i.e. in a single “container,” discrete memory and operating system processes are securely allocated to each database instance). So naturally, it should come as no surprise that Ellison opened this year’s OpenWorld (OOW) Conference yesterday in San Francisco announcing Oracle’s public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud along with a private service, followed by a detailed description of his company’s latest big bet. It’s called “12c” (the “c” stands for cloud) and Ellison is hawking it as the first multi-tenant database in the world, which of course it isn’t.

The difference between the private and public services is that the public cloud runs in an Oracle data center while the private version will run on Oracle hardware but at the customer’s premises, where it’ll be managed by Oracle. And there’s another difference: “I’ve been very critical of multi-tenancy at the application level. A lot of security features don’t work properly if the multi-tenancy is done at the application layer, but they do work properly in Oracle database 12c,” Ellison is reported to have said at OOW.

Oracle database 12c will be released in “calendar year 2013.” So it appears that the speculated Q1 release is out. In fact, the company’s beta program details haven’t even been announced. Finally, what impact 12c will have on Oracle’s current database licensing policies have yet to be vetted. But who knows, there are four days left for these and other questions to be answered. And if Oracle’s answers don’t sell, then they will find ones that do.

The healthcare industry, especially the GPOs, should be watching with great interest. Multi-tenancy architectures would seem to be a dream come true, allowing GPOs a more substantial and flexible way to deliver a variety of applications less expensively to their smaller and mid-sized providers/members.  After all, more efficient and less cost to manage thousands of separate databases is precisely the point.

Oracle’s strategies seem to work. But the company is rarely first anymore and that’s not a bad thing. Why innovate when you can wait for the marketplace to ask for it, then you can buy it, copy it, etc. And when you consider the conservative profile of a typical Oracle customer, well, let’s face it, they probably appreciate Larry’s learning curve more than he does.

—Tom Finn