Much has been written in the blogosphere recently of Oracle's Public Cloud announcement at the recent Oracle OpenWorld, and what (according to Larry) it means for data portability and the integration industry in general.
Quoting Larry from his keynote, comparing with Salesforce.com: "Our cloud's a little bit different ... our cloud is based on industry standards and supported full interoperability with other clouds. ... you can take any existing Oracle database you have and move it to our cloud. Just move it across and it runs unchanged. Oh by the way, you can move it back if you want to." He went on to say that Force.com is the "roach model of cloud services" due to its use of custom/proprietary programming languages like APEX. "You can check in, but you can't check out."
This makes for entertaining press, but the subtext here is that all one needs for data integration is some open standard APIs and the ability to run an Oracle database instance anywhere. In other words, it's all about portability.
Perhaps. If you have chosen to delegate all of your data to an Oracle-only software stack, then knowing you are "free" to run that database pretty much anywhere you want may feel liberating, freeing you from the dark forces of vendor lockin. In other words, avoid data lockin by ... wait for it ... consenting to lock in your data to one vendor's database? Really? And this coming from one of the great industry consolidators of the last decade, a strategy whose success depends on the maintenance revenue of customers keeping their data right where it is.
The dust has barely settled on last week’s Hadoop World and the blogosphere is still abuzz with the implications of various announcements, analyst reports and miscellaneous provocations that are inevitable in events like this. No better time than this blogger to jump into the fray! 
It has been a big, busy week at Informatica. We introduced HParser, the industry's data parser for Hadoop. As part of the launch activities, we recorded a video discussion on parse and visualize Big Data, featuring Brett Sheppard from Zettaforce, Ronen Schwartz, Vice President of B2B Products at Informatica, and Karl Van den Bergh, Vice President, Product and Alliances at Jaspersoft. The discussion helps you understand the approaches to extend Jaspersoft business intelligence (BI) and Informatica data integration investments to leverage data stored in Hadoop. HParser is designed to reduce the need for manually written Map/Reduce scripts. You can also check out the chalktalk
and product demonstration
So you're an IT manager (or an architect, or a business analyst, ...), and a vendor tells you that the amount of data in your org is exploding, and unless you buy from them RIGHT NOW, then you'll be left with an unmanageable Big Mess. By now you have probably heard it often enough that you're not sure whether to believe it. You've gotten this far without the latest newfangled tool from company X, you're not yet up to your eyeballs in messes, so why the urgency? Why not just keep doing what you're doing? 
