Oh, that pesky thingie about unintended consequences. My guess is that the screenwriters of the popular oenological movie Sideways did not intend to destroy the Merlot varietal with their very disrespectful line about it. They were just trying to be funny.

In similar fashion (I guess) the idea of old wine in new bottles is often brought up when it comes to Cloud Computing. To me this is not a bad thing, even with Merlot.

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The great thing about Cloud Computing is that there is nothing new here, but rather, so many advances of the past several years are coming together to create a new world. Oracle, for example, has been talking about grid computing for some time. Heck, I even remember Larry Ellison appearing on Oprah to talk about it, which had to be, by several magnitudes, the most enlightened discussion on that show ever. Actually, it was more of a monologue, because I'm not sure how prepared the host was to talk about the topic.

The idea, though, also known to us all as "the more things change, the more they stay the same" (as Steve Martin has said, "those French, they have a word for everything"), seems to lie at the heart of what I expect to be a very compelling keynote presentation by Oracle's Richard Sarwal and Hasan Rizvi at the upcoming Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York City. The keynote is entitled, "Enterprise IT and the Cloud--All New, All the Same," and it should be one of the highlights of the show.

Sarwal is SVP of Development for Oracle Enterprise Manager. He is responsible for the development of all aspects of Enterprise Systems Management at Oracle, covering all products—OS, Database, Middleware, Applications - including Provisioning, Patching, Configuration Management, Performance and Application Service Level Management. Prior to joining Oracle in 1989, he began his career as a programmer, DBA and systems engineer.

Hasan Rizvi is Senior Vice President of Oracle Fusion Middleware Products. He is responsible for Oracle's SOA, Application Server, Communications and Identity Management and Security product development, product management and architecture. Previously he was vice president of Oracle Enterprise Manager responsible for the company's Data Center Automation products. He holds eight patents in the database management area.

Paul Giamatti, we'd love to see you there!