Oracle OpenWorld starts Sunday. I am going with more enhanced expectations than I have in previous years
As a baseline, I expect to hear updates on Oracle SaaS – financials, HR, ERP, CRM and on the NetSuite business unit. With a very strong 1Q where application revenues went up 62% year-on-year, it will be interesting to hear from new customers and how Oracle expects to keep growing its market share.
I hope to hear a lot more about vertical applications in the cloud. That is the next frontier for SaaS and Oracle is ideally positioned to lead in a number of industries if they are prepared to make the investments.
The driverless database is clearly something Larry Ellison is very excited about. Beyond details on speeds and feeds, I hope Oracle can quantify the likely impact on outsourced managed services, DBAs, BASIS in SAP world and other payback areas. An added bonus would be if Oracle starts to articulate a vision of autonomous applications leveraging robotics, AI, wearables, drones etc in various business processes.
Finally, I look forward to hearing about Oracle’s IaaS momentum. In the June 2017 Gartner IaaS Magic Quadrant, Oracle was in the bottom right as a Visionary – way behind Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM and Alibaba. It’s not a position they are likely very happy with. I am sure there will be plenty of “quotable quotes” about Amazon. I would like to also hear how about they will pick up market share from the weaker, legacy infrastructure, telecom, hosting and outsourcing vendors. And how they plan to leverage their much stronger PaaS position.
That’s the fun part about covering Oracle. So many angles to consider. And this year the Chainsmokers are playing at AT&T Park. No shuttle buses to worry about, a reason why I have missed all the bands at previous OOWs. So, I may also get to check out some “tattoos on shoulders”