The Friday WTF Awards – Oracle Not The Only One Who Deserves Calling Out

I need to lighten things up a bit with all this Oracle brouhaha.

Oracle acquired Xsigo recently. I wrote about the acquisition and how Oracle will lose as IT gets virtualized. Oracle's Bob Evans came back with his own special brand of attack. Yesterday I responded with my post: Open? Yeah, Sure. Sorry Oracle, You're Still Full Of It.

Good times!

Last night, Michael Krigsman said in the comments to my post something I take to heart. Here's what he said:

These kind of backs and forths are a bit silly, but of course there are multiple perspectives here. Still, I like the human drama because that's what makes enterprise software interesting and accessible to a broader audience. For many people, this stuff is highly arcane, so the human dimension is beneficial even if the substance is a bit… well, like catcalling.

Despite the differences in position, I urge the parties to remain friendly and not resort to personal attacks and innuendo of any kind.

Right on, Mike!

But oh my word, we need some more of this excitement in the enterprise world. And so for that, I thank Bob for busting things out a bit. He said I made baseless claims about the Oracle cloud. I called him the king's blogger. But Oracle is not the only one doing things that I question. Yes, they're the worst of the crowd but not the only ones who do things that have me thinking WTF?

The big enterprise guys need more accountability. It is my job to call things out. So, with that in mind, here we go –  The Friday WTF Awards:

1. SAP – can you please make HANA something the makers of the world can use? You're a contender to be one of the enterprise giants that leap frogs over the rest. Let's see some something beautiful that any maker can create with all that data.
2. OpenStack — let's be real. You're an industry coalition. You have lots of developers and they make lots of contributions. They need a bigger voice. Transparency is an issue. We need more light into the workings of the organization.
3. Stop the madness, IBM. Your PureSystems technology is not a platform as a service. Focus on the real issues your tech solves. Cloudwashing doesn't look good.
4. Citrix — where is Cloudstack? Hello? Anyone home?
5. Amazon Web Services — when will you start talking with the community about your APIs? You could release them under Creative Commons. That would allow for standardization. You blessed Eucalyptus because it is only enterprise focussed but not CloudStack. How come? Is it because they also support service providers who could be AWS competitors?
6. VMware — lots of rhetoric about the Amazon cloud. No more FUD, please.
7. EMC — building out a data center with your big storage machines is not cloud. Call it hybrid, label it private – all that is fine. But in the end — you're selling your customers new storage systems. They're not elastic. They're not multi-tenant. It's just shiny new hardware for the data center.
8. Microsoft  and the curious case of Office 365. Why not open more APIs?
9. CA — their FUD about the cloud is deafening.
10. Infosys – Charges of visa abuse? What's up with that?
11. In the spirit of Spinal Tap, this list goes to 11. Cloud Analysts: we need more analysis, not marketing. Let's see it.

Have a good weekend, folks.

(Image courtesy of WTF with Marc Maron)