I have written before Oracle’s biggest cloud differentiation is it can play in all three layers – application, platform and infrastructure –as-a-service. Larry Ellison’s talk last night expounded on that as he spent time on each layer. But in many ways he set the stage for several questions I hope get answered during the course of the conference
a) How deep are the vertical cloud apps?
Larry presented two slides covering various industry applications – I show one below. But he glossed over them. That’s actually more exciting than HCM, GL or SFA functionality which has been “cloudified” for a while now – as Larry pointed out Salesforce.com has been around 15 years. I hope I hear more about vertical clouds.
b) How does SaaS leverage the IaaS?
Larry pointedly said with Oracle’s SaaS leveraging its PaaS, customers have a robust customization platform unlike competitors who he said offer just “a few buttons”. Frankly, Oracle’s just-as-big opportunity may be to pass along the economies of a massive data center cloud. Like to hear if they plan to. Like to hear if they are helping current EBS, Peoplesoft and other incumbent customers already lower their hosting costs with their IaaS
c) What migration tools is Oracle making available?
One of the big gating factors for many customers is the cost of data migration, integration, testing and user retraining that comes with the move to a new application or platform. Hopefully Oracle has thought about automation, not just opening up another market for systems integrators to sell more services.
d) How is the Buy and Build integration going?
Larry repeatedly acknowledged Oracle continues on an organic/acquired path as it has for a while now. The digestion of acquired applications takes way too long in our industry – Oracle has more experience with such integration but it still takes them years. Has Oracle learned how to speed this process?
e) What is the “pull” for incumbent customers?
I have said before Applications Unlimited was a brilliant Oracle move. But it has frozen its customers in place. What is the pull in the Oracle cloud to offset the massive appeal to just stay in place?
Look forward to learning more during the next few days.
