back to article Splunk hits Oracle's Larry where it hurts: His failure to win America's Cup boat race

Analytics flinger Splunk has slammed Oracle for what it describes as a “fundamental lack of knowledge and understanding” of the cybersecurity market. On Tuesday, as is the norm for his keynotes, Big Red founder and CTO Larry Ellison singled out a competitor’s products, and focused on its downfalls. But this time, rather than …

  1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    Nicely done.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I agree, that was a very elegant parting shot. :)

  2. Muscleguy

    Learning to sail

    One of the reasons why Team NZ has gone monohull is so that the boat will require a crew of actual sailors who can put up and take down sails. IOW we will have spinnakers again.

    This also means no cyclors, they will be banned. Too hard to get on and off to go sail handling.

    So Larry will have to hire people who are actually good at sailing, rather than drag racing.

    Foiling monohulls with spinnakers on the Hauraki Gulf. I can't wait.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Learning to sail

      > So Larry will have to hire people who are actually good at sailing, rather than drag racing.

      As a cat sailor I would disagree with you. It's a different skill set for sure and the tactics are different but I don't think you can claim that the Kiwis weren't 'actually good at sailing'.

      What hurts Larry much more is the nationality stipulations that mean a certain percentage of the crew must be from the country they are representing. The US just doesn't produce as many outstanding sailors as the antipodes do...

      Also cats can have spinnakers and they are glorious.

      1. Marc 13

        Re: Learning to sail

        /pedant_alert

        ...most cats use Gennakers rather than Spinnakers but either way, lots of fun :-)

        (I'll let you off though as you sail cats!)

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Learning to sail

          > I'll let you off though as you sail cats!

          That moment when you have everything balanced on the knife-edge between absolutely flying and a nasty pitch-pole. That moment when the leeward hull sets up a vibration, the wind in the shrouds start them humming and the boat starts singing to you. That moment when see the mixture of awe and jealously as you leave that super serious club racer in the Laser for dead :p

          1. Roger Kynaston
            Happy

            Re: Learning to sail

            Seriously OT but as a cruiser, six knots is flying in my Rival but we did average four knots across the Atlantic. I must try a racing cat one of these days.

      2. Uberseehandel

        Re: Learning to sail

        There are plenty of outstanding and smart US sailors, they won't go sailing with Ellison.

    2. Uberseehandel

      Re: Learning to sail

      Cyclors are not banned. They are always more efficient than grinders and generating power, as long as they are in the loop. Previously when the Swedes tried them they were out of the loop, and it was a bit uncoordinated, so people dropped the idea. But foiling monohulls probably need the power house to be more mobile than a cat does.

      Ellison has been involved in sailing for a long time, remember Sayonara? He just doesn't like it when the boat goes up and down. Because he has dropped out, we look like having multiple US entries for the next America's Cup regatta. Ellison is not much liked, many syndicates would rather miss a regatta than have to compete with him.

  3. Raffbone

    "Exec's have spat"

    Money fight!

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oracle is becoming the largest "meeee toooo!" vendor in the world. After they realized their decades long stronghold of thee primary key, proprietary DB, mainly deployed on prem with very expensive and ideally (proprietary Oracle HW) is quickly losing relevance to the dozens of new DB solutions. Also including cloud native solutions from Azure and AWS.

    Oracle is trying not to hyperventilate what their business looks like in the next 10-20 years.

    as for the "me to!" game - basically everything they mentioned pertaining to cloud and cyber security. Can they offer a solution? OF COURSE. with nearly unlimited resources and and army, anybody can.

    Good luck start at day 1 at the end of 2017. far...FAR behind. Good luck!

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Oracle is becoming the largest "meeee toooo!" vendor in the world.

      Becoming? You didn't think they invented the relational database did you?

      1. Lysenko

        You didn't think they invented the relational database did you?

        Codd only got as far as a book, System R was a research project and Ingres was essentially early open source. Leisure Suit read Codd, tried to copy System R (failed - couldn't reverse engineer enough of it) borrowed some Ingres concepts and then added his special sauce (commercial sales with Byzantine and aggressively enforced licensing).

        I'm told "valid" Oracle based systems exist, but I've never actually seen one. Every Oracle system I've encountered (every. single. one.) would have been improved by canning Larry's cash extraction stent and replacing it with PostgreSQL, HANA or even MS SQL Server or DB2 in some cases (I'm only discussing cases where ACID is essential - NoSQL generally just abbreviates to "No").

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A worthy punch back...

    ...but a bit rich for Splunk to have a go at someone else for price gouging.

  6. Shameless Oracle Flack

    Splunk's CEO doth protest too much

    "A canned statement emitted from Oracle's long-suffering flacks..."

    We're not really suffering, we flacks think Larry keeps things interesting, and there is no such thing as bad publicity.

    Seriously, who can argue that there is absolutely no way that Splunk can detect all relevant signals and remediate entire systems using that information? Larry's point is that Oracle deeply understands the application, hardware, and OS because we built it all. It's exactly how we make the system run autonomously.

    Splunk is part of the current security problem. It and many other vendors who sell point security solutions that customers are then supposed to integrate seamlessly have over promised and under delivered for years: custom, snowflake IT layer cakes of independent network, storage, and servers layered with a patchwork quilt of non-integrated security monitoring software are essentially defenseless against determined hackers, as Equifax and Deloitte have shown.

    Your only hope: find big allies (like Oracle, AWS, Google or Microsoft) to whom you can offload your infrastructure, APIs and apps and re-focus on defending a smaller surface area and territory. Focus your efforts on intensive testing and hardening of all your systems, leveraging red teams and really aggressive attack training.

    I tell you how to do it in this pretty awesome blog post:

    https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-companies-defenseless-against-cyberattacks-what-o-keefe-ph-d-/

    1. Mark 110

      Re: Splunk's CEO doth protest too much

      That blog is dreadful. Completely misses the point.

      As for SPLUNK being part of the security problem . . . at the end of the day its just a monitoring and alerting tool (yeah I know, bit simplistic). In my experience it brings things to the table that I haven't seen another product capable of.

    2. This post has been deleted by its author

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