A couple weeks past Oracle OpenWorld now and we are still awaiting some kind of word from the EU on the Oracle acquisition of Sun. Looking back to the conference, we saw HP participating in the keynote and various “third-party” vendors making announcements and exhibiting on the floor. As a friend of mine, representing a certain German applications company put it, “It’s very open here.”

That much is true and certainly to Oracle’s credit there exists a rich community of third-party vendors supplying options, alternatives and competing voices in the “Oracle market.” The “open ecosystem” approach is nothing if not a pragmatic one for enriching the solutions options for users while growing the overall level of involvement in the market by both users and vendors. And every so often, one of the third-party innovators is acquired and permanently absorbed into the Oracle DNA.

But speaking of “open,” we didn’t hear much about MySQL in San Francisco … understandable given EU concerns about its fate once acquired by Oracle. On the surface the European concern looks reasonable. But in reality, MySQL had a marginal upside in the enterprise on its own and, in our view, that’s why MySQL management shuffled the assets over to Sun in a lucrative-appearing asset sale in the first place.

Frankly, it’s just as likely that Oracle might find a useful role for MySQL in the Oracle “ecosystem” as not at this point. Why? Well, because in addition to IBM investing in open source EnterpriseDB, we have learned on Tuesday that Red Hat has weighed in with an investment in the company as well. It’s pretty clear that an open source database is going to be an option moving forward, whether it’s EnterpriseDB, MySQL, or both. For the EU, the operational adage today is that “new information has come to light.”

The question is whether the EU wants to see it, or recognize that the persistent high-stakes competitive game among the major IT players is likely to keep the open source database option viable. The real question remaining is whether enterprise users really care and whether the presumed cost-of-ownership advantages of the open source database model really hold up over the long haul.

“Internet Time.” Ah yes, futuristic, yet contemporary, very cool, post dot.com pervasive, chic, fast, efficient, lots of black clothing. Here’s the 411, though: “Internet Time” for most websites can be more like the New Jersey Garden State Parkway on a sunny Saturday afternoon in mid-July –  balky, slow, subject to maddening stoppages, and relying on legacy-style manual reporting by frustrated customers to identify its problems. A recent OAUG ResearchLine/DBTA study confirms the worst: Your organization is investing substantial time and resources in a website designed for e-commerce or to service customers, but in most cases, the customer experience is significantly worse than your organization fully appreciates. Now the really bad news, you are losing money … and losing it directly to your competitors as a result.

That is terrible, isn’t it? You may be thinking that those “other guys” need to get their act together. Think again. Do you have automated reporting for customer experience problems? No? Well, you are not alone, because practically nobody has them in place. Most problems are manually reported by irate, frustrated, and otherwise unsatisfied customers. Manually reported! How does that sound as a customer service strategy? To me, that feels like the “thanks” you get from old Bertha in the manual change lane at the Driscoll Bridge Toll Plaza on the GSP – “Yeah, we know it’s a lousy system. Waddya want, it’s Jersey.”

There used to be a rule-of-thumb in print publishing that one letter to the editor represented 10,000 actual readers. So, what does one report of website failure represent in terms of poor user experience? And what do the losses from these failures add up to in both the short-term and the long-term? We have posed a few questions here and you will too after you have had a chance to download and read the OAUG ResearchLine/DBTA report “Performance Under Pressure: The State of Enterprise Web Application Quality and Availability” without registration or any charge for OAUG members at: http://www.oaug.org/login.aspx?ref=/communications/publications/researchline/2009-07execsumm.pdf

Or you can email me directly for a copy at publisher@dbta.com.

Ex-governor Jim McGreevey (yes, that Jim McGreevey) actually automated and upgraded the user experience on the Garden State Parkway, proudly bringing us gum-chewing, consonant-dropping, but ever-popular Jerseyans into the new millennium. Personally, though, I still use the manual lanes and avoid E-ZPass. I’ve had enough experience dealing with New Jersey to know that no system here in the Garden State remains fully “on the level” and the best way to avoid unpleasant surprises is to avoid entanglements. Another couple of years of bad customer experience with your website just might have a similar effect on your customers.

Sybase Analyst Day at the New York Stock Exchange – One Reporter’s View

Coming off a record quarter as well as reporting 2008 revenues and operating income that reached all-time highs, it wasn’t surprising that it was a packed house of analysts attending the by-invitation-only proceedings at Sybase Analyst Day on May 13. With the hum of another “up” day taking place on the ground-floor trading level of the New York Stock Exchange at 11 Wall Street, Sybase Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Dr. Raj Nathan, gave the keynote address. In a wide-ranging overview of the company’s strategic direction and product offerings, which defined the company’s ‘standard of success’ for the future, Nathan laid out a future direction for the company that is unique in its focus on both strength in analytics and core participation in the mobility market – building on the capabilities already successfully put into place. Dr. Nathan mapped out the Sybase view of the unwired enterprise and strategy of integrating information sourced “from any data source, any server platform and any application”, transformed through analytics into actionable information, and then pushed out to any person, anywhere and always available.

The company reported its financial performance with evident pride, but reserved particular emphasis on its highest-ever rating of 96% on its customer support satisfaction. Mapping a future dominated by service to information workers and increasingly the consumer, Dr. Nathan presented a clear connection between the needs of consumers in collaboration, analytics and mobility, and the shape of IT in the months and years immediately ahead.

Recent product successes were also highlighted including the highly successful launch of Sybase RAP, the “unified market analytics platform that lets capital markets firms make more intelligent, efficient use of data for better analytics, decisions and reporting across the front-to-back office trade lifecycle”. Data management experienced a 30% growth curve in 2008, led by the recognition of Sybase as the leading column-based server leader in analytics by leading IT analysts. The roadmap for the future of Sybase 365 concluded the keynote session and this provided a snapshot into the integration of Sybase’s traditional information management and analytics business, with a wireless future identified by leadership in operator services, enterprise messaging and mCommerce in the rapidly emerging mobility market globally.

Breakout sessions followed during the afternoon, then a question-and-answer session with Chairman, CEO and President, John Chen. While the questions to Mr. Chen filled the time allotted, the tenor of the analyst and media cross-examination appeared muted by the company’s vision, execution and superb financial performance. And in response to Five Minute Briefing’s question about the alignment of Sybase’s information management and mobile initiatives from a customer standpoint, Dr. Nathan provided a lucid and straight-forward connection: that alignment will be based on synchronization of data between central applications and remote devices, with data moving in both directions – most evident today in remotely entered data driven back to a centralized database and application, but with a clear eye on an increasing level of data pushing out from centralized sources and then residing on mobile devices.