I have analyzed Oracle for over two decades – at PwC, at Gartner, and now at Deal Architect. I have written before Oracle does not get enough respect – I would say it has to work twice as hard as other vendors to score points with market watchers. There are plenty of analysts who are turned off by Oracle’s bombast, others who feel slighted by the way Oracle segments analysts and media and no shortage of customers who complain about its aggressive tactics.
I have learned to focus more on Oracle’s product trajectories. I get the most from sessions like last year’s Cloud Summit, and last week’s Cloud ERP briefing. It is good to see Oracle’s cloud SKUs continue to explode and customers of all stripes continue to grow.
Last week, product leaders crisply marched through features in Financials, Procurement, Projects, Performance Management and Supply Chain modules and provided quick updates on Oracle’s IaaS and PaaS. They also shared customer details, most under NDA as it is Oracle’s quiet period. The presentations were confident, yet humble, with plenty of time for questions.
A nice touch was a session with CEO Safra Catz. In the two decades I have followed Oracle, I cannot recall the last time she has addressed industry analysts. With her banking and CFO roots she has always presented to financial analysts while executives like Ray Lane, Charles Phillips and Mark Hurd have addressed industry analysts and media. Safra was witty and self-deprecating. When I asked that a few years ago, Clayton Christensen’s theories would have forecast Oracle and other large vendors would be disrupted, she interrupted and suggested the word “dead?” She then proceeded to explain that Oracle pioneered Business OnLine in the late 90s, and Larry Ellison was an early investor in SaaS startups like Salesforce and NetSuite. It was nicely done – not a whiny “you analysts have never appreciated our cloud chops”.
Still, over the course of the day, there were several occasions when I felt Oracle cloud applications will need to go through a few more iterations of change. A walkthrough of their UX lab was like that of Q’s workshop in Bond movies. An Amazon Echo, smart watches, several gestural devices point to further changes in interfaces. Our expectations are being shaped by rapidly evolving UX in our cars and homes. Enterprise UX expectations are being pushed by work at Microsoft, Apple and others.
Functionally, the Oracle cloud apps feature sets mirror those of PeopleSoft, Hyperion, Primavera and other products written a few decades ago. With my current book research, I see that every job is going to be touched by machine learning, robotics, 3D printing and a variety of other automation technologies. Every business process and user role will be affected as man and machine converge, and Oracle applications will have to reflect that new world.
So, I look forward to product progress at Oracle, and a continued sense of humility, even if they only get grudging respect from the analyst corps.
