Oracle's Larry Ellison (left), who got a gentle pasting from Autonomy's Mike Lynch (right) in a press release “Oracle seems a little confused about the sequence of events and origins of the data it has received, something that would suggest it needs better management of and insight into the unstructured data on its internal systems. We would be delighted to help.”

Certainly HP Board member (above) Marc Andreessen thinks that the clock is ticking on Oracle and other old-line software and infrastructure companies, reports  Business Insider. 

Andreessen reasoning follows that of B. C. Forbes, whose investment advice was always to buy into products your friends liked and used. His evidence: not a single one of his Andreessen-Horowitz's startup investments uses Oracle software. They use cloud-based alternatives instead.

Andreessen opened BoxWorks, the first-ever customer conference for cloud collaboration provider Box.net, in San Francisco. His firm invested in Box, he says, partly because he found that a lot of the other startups they were funding already used the product.

"Objectively looking where they [Oracle] are, they have all the old software, they've cranked up the maintenance fees. That's all well and good for customers that model, but they have not leaped forward into this change."

Exadata machine and Exalogic Cloud
An hour before the doors opened, lines 400 deep formed at each main doors of the Moscone Center, in San Francisco, where Oracle was holding OpenWorld 2011. The 400 people amounts to considerably less than 1% of the 45,000 registered attendees over the next few days.

Every major hotel is sold out. People are arriving from 117 countries, Oracle says, to hear about its database software and view the offerings from 450 other companies that have paid to exhibit in the 300,000-square-foot exhibition hall. For at least one tech giant, it seems, times are good reports the New York Times.

Oracle's current launch is the integration of hardware and software to enable applications to take advantage of extreme performance.

"Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic ElasticCloud deliver tangible business benefits across all Oracle Application suites,” claims (right) Steve Miranda, SVP of Application Development, Oracle.

“By optimising the integration with Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle is not only enabling extreme performance, reliability and availability across its complete application solutions, but also delivering new capabilities that directly support line of business managers.”

But the jury could still be out.