Steve Miranda led an excellent session this morning on Oracle’s growing hortizontal apps empire. Set on a stage with a sweeping view of downtown San Francisco and the Bay it reflected the expansive portfolio it has built and acquired. The session was crisp and covered wide ground in three parts – a) an update on current on-premise products b) messaging around the new cloud apps and c) a panel with four customer executives
In a) Steve comforted EBS, PeopleSoft, Siebel and JD Edwards customers there was no intention to hustle them to the cloud. It was reassuring with slides showing thousands of new features and new in-memory and mobile apps and blazingly fast performance on the in-Memory database for each of the customer bases. As I wrote yesterday, these customers are in a pole position, and Steve’s slides likely reassured them even more.
In b) he shared growing cloud customer and product volumes (see below) and three value points of its cloud apps – “Personalized” (“works as well as my teen’s apps”), “Connected” (Oracle with so many organic and acquired products better be thinking about thorny integration issues) and “Secure” ( 19 Tier 4 class data centers around globe, other benefits of its growing IaaS and private cloud footprint)
In c) he had executives on stage from BG Group, Marriott, atradius and GE. They represented complex and global challenges – GE is rationalizing over 100 ERP instances from Oracle and others, Marriott talked about social interaction with over 47 million loyalty members, atradius manages collections of over a billion in worldwide debt for its 14,500 global customers, BG Group has HR shared services across 20 countries. And in different ways they discussed speed – GE put in Fusion financials in Mexico in 48 days, Marriott has cut in half social data ingestion time it used to take its agencies with significantly better data quality and atradius talked about a rapid three month SFA project.
So, Steve could have added “Sophistication” and “Speed” to his three value points in b)
Definitely one of my favorite sessions at OOW!
Bonus - I got to meet another executive at Marriott which has been my home for 4 years of lifetime stays - seriously.
