What’s The Internet Worth To You?

What a great question–what’s the Internet or your Smartphone worth to you?Most people seems to say they wouldn’t give these up–not even for a million dollars!

Maybe $15-20 million–enough to never have to work again. Okay, now you’re getting closer.

Nah, I want a billion dollars to give up the Internet–that’s what some people responded.

For me, I’m not certain even a billion dollars could keep me off the Internet–but I could certainly try it for a few days.

Being able to communicate, connect, learn, share, and transact online is like air and water to us now-a-days–an absolute necessity for modern survival.

Without being able to do these things, you may as well be on a stranded island–you may own that Island (like Larry Ellison who bought the 6th largest Hawaiian Island of Lanai) and it may be quite a nice one at that, but you’ll still be quite secluded and alone in the Internet age.

Yes, the Internet and all we get from it costs only pennies on the millions (and/or billions) of dollars worth we each receive from it–and that’s why on some things you cannot put a price tag.

We’re in this world to learn and grow and for that we need other people far and wide–either that or you’ll need to have one heck of a big and non-stop party at home in paradise. 😉

Oracle – An Architecture Treasure-trove

Anyone following the strategic acquisitions by Oracle the last few years can see a very clear trend: Oracle is amassing a treasure-trove of business applications that are powerful, interoperable, and valuable to mission delivery.

Most recently, Oracle snapped up Sun for $7.38 billion, right from under the clutches of IBM!

Oracle with $22.4 billion in revenue in 2008 and 55% of license revenue generated overseas “is the world’s largest business software company, with more than 320,000 customers—including 100 of the Fortune 100—representing a variety of sizes and industries in more than 145 countries around the globe.”(www.oracle.com)

Oracle’s roots are as a premiere database company. However, since 2004, they made more than 50 acquisitions in calculated business areas.

The Wall Street Journal, 21 April 2009, identifies some of these notable buys:

2004—PeopleSoft for human resources and financial management.

2005—Siebel for customer relationship management.

2007—Hyperion Solutions for business intelligence.

2008—BEA Systems for infrastructure management.

2009—Sun Microsystems for software, servers, and storage devices.

“Oracle has been able to acquire companies with operating-profit margins of 10% and within six months expand those margins to 40%.”

With the recent purchase of Sun, Oracle is gaining control of critical open-source software such as Java programming technology, Solaris operating system, and MySQL database.

According to Forrester Research, “Forty-six percent of businesses plan to deploy open-source software in 2009.” Oracle can now provide an important service in product support and updates for this. (Wall Street Journal, 22 April 2009)

In addition, Oracle also provides various middleware to integrate business applications and automate processes.

From databases to end-user applications, from service-oriented architecture to infrastructure management, from content management to business intelligence, Oracle has put together a broad impressive lineup. Of course, this is NOT an endorsement for Oracle (as other companies may have as good or even better solutions), but rather an acknowledgement of Mr. Ellison’s keen architecture strategy that is building his company competitively and his product offering compellingly. Ellison is transforming the company from a successful single brand that was at risk of becoming commoditized to a multi-faceted brand with synergies among its various lines of business and products.

Some lessons for enterprise architects and CIOs: Build your product lineup, create synergies, uniformly brand it, and be number one or number two in every product category that you’re in (as Jack Welch famously advised) and grow, grow, grow!