Ellison: Oracle Customers Will Embrace Grid ComputingEllison: Oracle Customers Will Embrace Grid Computing

Half of Oracle's customer base will adopt grid-computing technology and practices within the next three-to-five years, CEO Larry Ellison predicted Tuesday, following his OracleWorld keynote address in which he extolled the grid-computing capabilities of the new Oracle 10g database, application server, and management tools.

During his one-hour speech, Ellison touted grid computing is an alternative to relying on ever-larger, monolithic servers for enterprise computing. The latter are expensive and unscalable, and they represent a potential single point of failure, he argued, while grid computing provides a better way to balance processing workloads and are more fault-tolerant.

While some raise questions about security within a grid environment, Ellison said a grid environment with centralized identity management is more secure than multiple, dedicated servers with their own lists of authorized users.

Ellison argued that grid computing provides "10 times the computing at one-tenth the price. The economics are compelling." His prediction that half of Oracle's customers would be using grid computing in three to five years came during a news conference after his speech, though he acknowledged that "it's not going to happen overnight."

Oracle will announce pricing for the Oracle 10g products next week. Ellison wouldn't provide details, but hinted that the pricing could be lower than current prices for the vendor's products.

And during a question and answer session after his speech, Ellison said he expects Oracle will win government approval in October or November to acquire PeopleSoft Inc. Executive VP Chuck Phillips will hold a media briefing Wednesday to discuss the status of Oracle's PeopleSoft buyout effort.

IT is rapidly becoming a commodity and Ellison predicted that some time in the future "Silicon Valley will more closely resemble Detroit." He also predicted that the IT industry will consist of a few giants, including IBM, SAP, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and Microsoft, and a number of small, specialized IT vendors. Rival BEA Systems Inc. was among those companies he predicted wouldn't survive.