Oracle’s Middle Earth

In a recent blog post I discussed canine expert Cesar Millan’s view of a pack of  dogs – alpha, those in the middle, those at the back. He talks about a role for each.

Interestingly, in the IT world, lots of focus is going to the back office – especially cloud trends in Workday, Fusion etc. My books tend to look at “alpha” – innovative, strategic advantage, mostly custom IT investments. The recent one, The Digital Enterprise looked at transformative products, services, customer focus, business models in over 20 industries. 

The middle – vertical, operational systems - does not get much play in media world. Many vendors are focused on horizontal analytical, social, mobile technologies. At Oracle OpenWorld last Fall, I expressed disappointment there was so little focus on industry applications. And I was told – come to the Industry Connect event. It’s all about verticals.

So, here I am at the event in Boston, where Oracle has brought together customers from 6 verticals – Primavera representing project, resource intensive industries.

My schedule here includes sessions led by executives from Neiman Marcus, Best Buy, UPMC, Cardinal Health, NE Utilities, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, National Australia Bank, Hughes Telematics. Rare you can get so many industry perspectives in a packed couple of days.

Mark Hurd, President in his keynote presented some key metrics of Oracle’s industry investments – 21,000 employees,  10% of total R&D, 26 industry specific acquisitions in the last 5 years. And the payback – in the past 3 1/2 years, Oracle’s industry specific revenues have tripled.