deal architect

Salesforce: why so much hype?

They come in threes, don’t they? In the last week, I have read three pieces which have my hype antenna buzzing about Salesforce

• IDC in an annual study commissioned by Salesforce says the ecosystem of customers and partners will drive the creation of 3.3 million new jobs and more than $859 billion in new business revenues worldwide by 2022. In addition, by 2022 the Salesforce partner ecosystem will gain $5.18 for every dollar Salesforce earns. To generate revenue you need a product, you need a business model, and you need a customer channel. You need more like a strong brand but let’s stay with those three. Salesforce does not help companies build products or services. Foxconn, Flex, IDEO and many Tier 1 and 2 suppliers do.  It does not help you with your business model or order entry or billing. It does help you with your channel, but far less than you may think. It helps with direct sales force automation, much less with resellers, franchisees, store or ecommerce sales. It helps with digital marketing but the world still spends way more on trade promotions and analog advertising on TV, billboards and other media. So taking credit for generating customer revenues seems to be a stretch. As for the ecosystem, 5X for every dollar spent on Salesforce is actually not something to be proud of. Because that does not include internal staffing costs customers need to factor on top. Pretty soon you are looking at SAP Nation type numbers. For a very small part of the enterprise coverage SAP gives its customers. I am not sure why Salesforce brags about that and keeps showing larger numbers every year.
• John Sumser is his recent report on “intelligent HR software” comments “We were unable to find actual Al, but that doesn’t mean that the work is not important—it means that calling it Al distracts from the value that these companies are creating.”. Bluewolf, now part of IBM, has issued its sixth State of Salesforce report and should have heeded John’s advice. The report is  intensely focused on the term AI.  I would have liked to see actual, real life use cases. It is light on such examples but does cite how AI from Salesforce and IBM helped in creation of the report itself

“….we asked Einstein to analyze specific data sets to discover patterns based on demographic information, including region, role, company  size, and industry, and to quickly capture trends among Sales, Service, Marketing, and IT respondents. Simultaneously, IBM Watson Discovery scanned news sources, attaching a sentiment rating to the top trends we identified by using Einstein Data Discovery. These analytics enabled us to validate insights from the data.”

Isn’t that good use of analytics, not AI? Frankly, I would like to see how IBM/Bluewolf are using AI to streamline their own consulting labor and to reduce the 5X cost IDC describes above.

Now on to the hype. To make sure you realize AI is hot, the report uses the term AI over 75 times in its 66 pages. As an innovation author, I was excited to write about advances in AI in my book on automation, Silicon Collar. But I also pointed out we just make incremental progress every few years.

“(1950) is when Alan Turing defined his famous test to measure a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to that of a human. In 1959, we got excited when Allen Newell and his colleagues coded the General Problem Solver. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick sent our minds into overdrive with HAL in his movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. We applauded when IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer beat Grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997. We were impressed in 2011 when IBM’s Watson beat human champions at Jeopardy! and again in 2016 when Google's AlphaGo showed it had mastered Go, the ancient board game. Currently, we are so excited about Amazon's Echo digital assistant/home automation hub and its ability to recognize the human voice, that we are saying a machine has finally passed the Turing Test. Almost.” There are plenty of other reality checks in the book.

• While the two above were commissioned by Salesforce or a partner, they likely only provided fodder for the third one, an article from Business Insider on preparing for Dreamforce next week. 1,000+ words later you will not have a clue about product direction or announcements, but you get invaluable advice like “Plan to party hard” and “ Pack a portable charger – or two”. Whatever, but the hype comes in the disclosure that the event will offer 2,700 sessions and attract 170,000 attendees. Oracle OpenWorld had 2,500 sessions and 60,000 attendees and they offer a much wider range of IaaS, PaaS and on=premise products. And navigating 60,000 attendees was exhausting enough. 3X that? Who exactly do they think they are impressing? Especially when the article warns you to be prepared to pay $ 900 per hotel night.

I will try and catch some live-streamed Dreamforce sessions and hear what my fellow analyst colleagues have to say. Some day soon, I hope I can get briefed by Salesforce in a much smaller setting. And hopefully without all the hype.  

Oracle Cloud Accelerator–Part 1

At Oracle OpenWorld, Letty Ledbetter set up several interesting breakout sessions for a handful of us analysts. One of the more enjoyable ones was when Reggie Bradford, SVP described their Cloud Accelerator program.

Located in Bangalore and Delhi in India, Bristol in the UK, Paris in France, São Paulo in Brazil , Singapore and Tel Aviv in Israel, the selected startups benefit from:
• Access to the Oracle IaaS and PaaS and the R&D team
• Engagement opportunities with Oracle’s 400,000÷ customers

Unlike other incubators or accelerators, Oracle does not take equity. Reggie had with him two of the entrepreneurs in the first batch, and I had a chance to follow up with both.

Paul Archer is Founder & Managing Director of Duel. Based in the UK, Duel is focused on enhancing brands. Using machine learning and vision tagging, Duel engages customers post-purchase and rewards them for creating visual testimonials.  The service helps turn customers into brand ambassadors, content creators and advocates — and manages, amplifies and moderates it for brands at enterprise scale.

Here are some of his comments

• One of the most memorable points of that trip was a visit to Larry Ellison’s Pacific Heights residence with some of the other accelerator startup executives. He spent a couple of hours with us and really seemed to enjoy being around us young entrepreneurs. There were plenty of stories about the good old days when they started Oracle. We covered a lot of ground from his deep interest in biosciences to scaling your talent as your company grows. Definitely a highlight of my week at OOW. 
• At our small size today, we likely would not have looked at Oracle as a development platform.  However, I think now that is clear that that's not the case - we will be using their technology and we'll be adding service that we need, and at our level too... and at our price points too, which is really exciting.
• We have been working with Oracle’s industry/innovation advisors who are working with major clients like an external consultant would. So, we're very nicely positioned to work with those guys to get in at the right level.
• There's corporate bureaucracy at any company and certainly at one the size and scale of Oracle. But we have seen the accelerator bulldoze through the barriers
• We have barely been on the market for a couple of months with our e-commerce proposition. Even so, we're able to command a decent amount of VC meetings because they know that we've got the backing of Oracle, and if they ever want to do their due diligence we can pass them on to some of the senior guys in the team in Oracle

In a follow up note, I will cover my conversation with Asaf Eldad of 3DSignals from Israel.

The emergence of intelligent HR software

I recently wrote from Workday Rising about the Age of Intelligence. It’s not just Workday which has been busy. John Sumser of HE Examiner has a study which looks at intelligent tools at Workday and 29 other HR-centric vendors.

He has some interesting observations and caveats including

• We began the report as an investigation into Artificial Intelligence. We were unable to find actual Al, but that doesn’t mean that the work is not important—it means that calling it Al distracts from the value that these companies are creating.
• We considered describing the tools as “machine led decision making,” because the services (save one) all deliver recommendations and guidance. There is a fair chance that those recommendations will be implemented without much consideration. Who can argue with a machine? And how would you do it?

While there is clear value in reading what he has to say about each vendor, I particularly liked his simple, cogent definitions of Machine Learning, Robotic Process Automation and so many other terms which get thrown around when you talk about today’s AI and analytics.

Even more, I liked 21 use cases he covers in the report. including a sample above.

Buy your self a copy here.   

Hey Alexa, Siri want to impress me?

My wife has already had it with digital assistants. Alexa seems to wake up to the inflections of her Irish accent. Siri to mis-pressed buttons in the car or her phone.

I am a bit more patient but I also expect just a bit more. Here’s a few recent episodes where I could have used an assistant

- On a long drive I wanted to hear the NFL Bucs game. So I scanned the AM channel spectrum on the radio. No luck. That’s where all the sports and talk shows reside, don’t they? About to give up I stopped and Googled and found it on a FM station. Would have been nice to just say “Siri, play the Bucs game”

- During the ALCS game last week, I saw the game was on FS1. Tried the cable channel. They had our hockey team playing. I tried Fox, ESPN, other channels. No luck. Tried the Fox to Go app on the tablet. No luck. Downloaded the MLB At Bat app – only had a radio broadcast. Finally signed up for a trial subscription to Fubo TV and watched the game on my laptop. Would have been nice to just yell at Alexa on my Fire TV Stick “Play the baseball game” and for it to be smart enough to say “Now make sure and cancel the trial Fubo subscription. It’s not cheap at $ 39.95 a month”

- Avis rented me a Volvo XC60. I swear it took me 10 minutes to punch in the address on the nav using the buttons on the console. A touch screen would have been nice. Even better I should have just dictated the address to the car’s assistant. More recently one of their Toyota RAV4s displayed a steaming coffee cup message suggesting I take a break from driving. I would have liked for it to have answered my question “Is that because I have been driving too long, or do the sensors on the steering wheel suggest I am swaying too much?”

Our expectations are about to explode.

• Independently, our two kids setting up new places went and bought TCL TVs with built in Roku. It’s their gateway to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Videos, YouTube Red and who knows what else. We are going to need assistants to help us navigate all the choices. Accessible via our remote controls.
• The Smart Home is starting to take shape. Video Doorbells, Smart Sprinklers, Keyless Locks and many other devices are populating our homes. We will need assistants to help configure and repair them. Accessible via speakers.
• My wife and I have different Hyundai SUVs. The rear camera display is different, the proximity sensors set off alarms at different times, the navigation system UX is almost completely different. Same manufacturer, same feature sets. Now extrapolate that to all the new safety features as carmakers roll out the many driver assistance features already available in the Audi Q7. We will need assistants to guide us through these choices. Accessible, right there, in our cars.

As we have seen over and over in the last decade what we experience at home influences our expectations of enterprise tech. They are already starting to introduce their own assistants like SAP with CoPilot. They will be expected to navigate many more systems to find us answers. And we will expect them to be accessible in our offices, our cars, our flights and our homes.

Alexa, can you please show me your future?

Book Review: The Age of Sustainability

I seek out Denis Pombriant, a fellow analyst, at industry events. We hardly ever talk about enterprise software. He is a history buff and a foodie and I walk away always having learned something and happier given his cheerful disposition.

Given his prodigious knowledge of US history I called him when I was writing Silicon Collar and asked him why as a society we go through “panic attacks” every few decades about automation causing catastrophic job losses. He explained that by talking about K-waves – Kondratiev’s long -term economic cycles.

His new book expresses optimism about the world of renewables and sustainability from his perspective of a K-Wave for the next few decades.

First a personal pov: As an innovation author I have written about Kleiner’s cleantech portfolio and Facebook and Google’s hyper efficient data centers in my books and I have countless blogs on New Florence on EVs and renewables. But I am not dewy-eyed about renewables. I believe in energy diversity for national security reasons. I am impatient that decades after subsidizing corn for ethanol, home solar salebacks to utilities and other incentives renewable energy still scales only so gradually and has hardly made a dent in our commercial transport sector.  And I smile at the guilt trip people set us on – see the frequency and ferocity of hurricanes this year? Has to be all the carbon pollution. Hello, I live in Florida and for a decade after Al Gore’s scary book and movie, NO hurricanes make landfall. I am hoping for similar with his sequel. Disruptive as the 2017 hurricane season has been, it may not even crack the top 5 most active in history.  Or the outrage that more of us in Florida do not have solar panels. Why not guilt the solar industry for doing a poor job pricing and blanketing the entire US South and Southwest with our plentiful sunshine? Or those who with bated breath talk about EVs. EVs are clean only in places like Canada or Norway where the majority of utility fuel comes from hydro. In the rest of the world, utilities we depend on to charge EVs are still heavily dependent on fossil fuels.

I found Denis’ book measured from that point of view. He covers wide ground when it comes to energy – the role of albedo in deflecting solar radiation, carbon sequestration, the limits to hyrdo and nuclear power growth, the risks that come with fracking, the concept of “peak oil”.  He is also realistic about our fossil fuel infrastructure and sunk costs. Not going away anytime soon because they also are source of raw materials for essentials like plastics and tires.

Given Denis’ meandering style, I also enjoyed as a bonus his various detours though how the English broke through in the quest for maritime navigational precision in the 1700s, the US Space Program in the 1960s and how different religions view man’s role in global warming.

It is a good read - will make you think long and hard why energy continues to be one of the globe’s vexing “Grand Challenges”. And why we need solar and wind energy in particular to scale up much more quickly and at far lower costs if we are serious about diversifying from fossil fuels.

Of Halloween and Enterprise Software

This time of the year, I buy several packages of assorted candies. Keeps the neighborhood kids who come around on Halloween happy. I happened to check the contents of one pack – it had Hot Tamales, Chewy Lemonheads, Tootsie Rolls, Abra Cabubbles and who knows what else.

Would a 4 year old ask for those? Would their parents want their kids to have them?

And it hit me, enterprise software has become a bit like those assortment packs. I have asked scores of vendor executives why everyone is fixated on analytics and AI and not on functionality. They respond users cannot absorb our pace of feature delivery. In contrast, most customers say they see lots of me-too functionality and very little industry functionality.  They are offered pretty analytics. Or tools which invoke grand wizards like Coleman and Pacioli and then underwhelm.  And told to look for functionality from partners. Like the candy bag – too much of what customers don’t need, too little of what they would like.  Then you have the other kind of bundling. You want SAP S/4? It only comes in the package with HANA. You want Oracle autonomous database 18c? Get ready to also sign up for Oracle’s infrastructure cloud. Or as Larry Ellison says tongue in cheek “only if you are willing to be pay less than you would pay Amazon”. You want Salesforce’s AI Einstein? Sign up for the package with IBM Watson. Take two AIs and call us in the morning.

It reminds me of the quote from Forrest Gump “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.” I don’t know – for what companies pay for enterprise software they should be allowed to be a lot more picky. It seems vendors are driven more by marketing advantage with the latest buzzwords than customer needs.

I have a better idea. We should move to a concept around another holiday – Fukubukuro. Around their New Year, Japanese stores sell a  "lucky bag” with all kinds of mystery items. But they do so at ridiculously low prices.

Workday and the Age of Intelligence

Mike McNamara is CEO of a remarkable $ 25 bn a year company that many people do not know much about. Flex is contract manufacturer for a wide range of products from automobiles to medical devices. Its design and shop floor fingerprints show on a wide range of products from Cisco routers to components for Ford cars to HP servers.  They manufacture across 50m square feet in 100 sites in 30 countries and have to be extremely agile. In an interview I did with him a couple of years ago, I was struck by his comment that in some years they move a quarter of their physical plant across borders! Customers want to make products as close as possible to demand– to take advantage of changing US energy economics, to be closer to emerging middle classes in Indonesia or Brazil and other trends. This triangulation across industries, geographies and customers allows them to see changing component supply chains and design and technology trends and  “see the future earlier” than the average company.

In a presentation at Workday Rising in Chicago this week, McNamara said to survive and thrive in this world you have to move from thinking of the information age to believing we are in the age of intelligence. He described their IT infrastructure, with the top layer as software platforms which translate data into actionable insights and feed them into digital displays to his workers. His CMO said two years ago  "And while we recognize that the company flourished in the Information Age, we are now defining the new Age of Intelligence. Our name change – from Flextronics to Flex – reflects our evolution."

A decade ago, as I described at the start of SAP Nation, McNamara and his team took a significant risk going with a very young Workday as their global HR platform. Now they see Workday as an integral part of their intelligence platform. So do a growing number of Workday’s 1,800 customers and it was apt that the focus in the conference was on a wide array of analytics and on the platform that Workday is starting to open up.

Here are some key themes

- While the transaction systems are still HR and financials focused (and many of the sessions focused on nearly 900 features introduced in release 28 and 29), the planning products have been some of the fastest adopted by customers

- If the excitement around Prism analytics is any indication, their adoption will dwarf the momentum the planning products have seen. Early adopters include Christiana Care, Hitachi, Shelter Mutual Insurance, Thomson Reuters, and United Technologies Corporation. Prism builds on the Big Data discovery tools it acquired via Platfora  and allows for bringing together data from a wide range of Workday and surround, especially vertical applications like patient accounting systems in healthcare, point of sales systems in hospitality and policy and claims in insurance.

- Workday founder Dave Duffield likes to talk about the Power of One having all his customers on the same release. The real Power of One is starting to show in the benchmarking, Data-as-a- service Workday has launched. An opt-in service, it allows customers to benchmark against peer companies on metrics such as employee turnover, span of control and business process effectiveness. The service should grow in power as Workday lines up external data sources

- Soon after its GridCraft acquisition in 2015, Workday introduced “collaborative analytics” in its Worksheets – some called that its “Hyperion killer”. The team in Boulder has been busy and has been releasing additional offerings

- The number of pre-built dashboards continues to grow as is the focus on the “close to disclose” process.

- The opening of the platform is allowing for extending the Workday reach into the enterprise and allowing for more data within its reach.  The conference covered some of the early apps being developed on the platform including ID services at an airline and supplier requisitions. I liked a slide with a “your idea here” text box. The simple words are a bold invitation for customers and service partners to experiment with the platform

One of the presenters in the conference said “data has replaced oil as the most important commodity these days”. Actually, it is refined oil in the form of gasoline, diesel and kerosene which makes the world go. Similarly refined data in the form of actionable intelligence is what makes companies like Flex go. The Workday refinery will be working overtime for the next few years. 

NetSuite: Still alive and kicking

Oracle OpenWorld had even more going on than usual. Larry Ellison was so focused on autonomy facilitated by database version 18c that he had only slide for a number of other features it will introduce like 5 times faster RAC. Thomas Kurian, in his keynote covered very wide ground and he barely had time to talk much about AI as a service and the analytics cloud. I had time to just shake hands with Steve Miranda and Chris Leone when I would have loved to spend much longer discussing the impressive SaaS results Oracle has been reporting.

So, given all this, it would not have been surprising if NetSuite had been forgotten at OOW. Indeed, many had projected that NetSuite would quickly disappear, post-acquisition into the Oracle black hole. Many of Oracle’s acquisitions in the last decade had underutilized the employee and customer assets they acquired. Oracle appears to have learned from them and is treating NetSuite differently.

Mark Hurd had the NetSuite keynote moved from a nearby hotel for breakout tracks to the main hall at Moscone. Several analysts had their schedules changed to spend time in the NetSuite track. We spent some time with Evan Goldberg, the founder and he told us SuiteWorld, Netsuite’s own annual event would continue next year.

The biggest boost to NetSuite is it is leveraging Oracle’s global sales channels. That is freeing up investment dollars to accelerate localizations for several key local markets. The slide below shows what NetSuite would have expanded on its own versus what the Oracle channel is allowing them to cover.

I hoped to hear Oracle’s industry groups would similarly allow NetSuite to expand its industry feature set. Evan said they would continue to be cautious and not expand the product set too widely. The current industry coverage (in slide below) is not bad but the white space of industry applications which have not seen cloud and other modern architectures is large. 

Still, the good news is NetSuite continues with its own brand momentum, and Oracle may have learned to handle acquisitions better than it did in the past.

Workday Rising: Sneak Preview from Dan Beck

Workday’s annual user conference, Workday Rising, is in Chicago starting Monday. The European version is in Barcelona in a few weeks.

It’s always an enjoyable event with “The Citizens of the Cloud” - some of the happiest customers in the world. Founders Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri showcase an entertaining keynote, and this year I am looking forward to hearing a talk from Mike McNamara, CEO of Flex, who I have profiled in my books and is always fascinating to listen to, and Peyton Manning, still one of my favorite ever football players.

I caught up with Dan Beck, SVP Platform Technology, and he kindly gave me a sneak preview of what we can expect next week

Data and Analytics

The theme this year is, "Go further together." It's what we continually strive to do by sharing our ideas, our insights, and our innovations in this venue. Last fall, as you recall, we made a couple of big promises to our customers around data and analytics. We're going to deliver on those at Workday Rising. As we shared early details with you in the Analyst Summit, we've made great strides to extend the analytical power of Workday to give our customers deeper insights into their business, and drive more informed decision-making. Some of the new offerings that will be rolled out will be, as always, unified with the rest of our products. Unified with Workday Financial Management, unified with Workday Human Capital Management, unified with Workday Planning, and empowering customers with one system where they can plan, execute, and analyze their businesses securely.

Our Platform

Expect plenty of excitement about the Workday Cloud Platform. We announced that we're opening up the Workday Cloud Platform in July, as you know, and we've seen a lot of applications and innovation -- first developed at the hackathon that we did in July during Workday Altitude in the U.S., and currently as part of our early adopter program. When we roll out new offerings, we always have a small set of customer design partners that we actively engage with to build out their use cases. We're going to share examples of those extensions and what they've built. Then we’ll share more details on partners that have been engaged with us on the Workday Cloud Platform to see what they've done, as well as new possibilities and some teasers for what's in store for the future.

The Refreshed UX

Another highlight that you'll see is a refresh of our user interface (UI). With Workday 29, which was our September 9th release, we've added that next level of personalization, sophistication, accessibility, which are more important than ever. We always listen to our customers, and their input really comes to life in this update – with new images, signs, and iconography incorporated into a new look and feel, which is very elegant and modern. Big credit to Joe Korngiebel and our UI and UX teams – we look forward to seeing how our customers engage and enjoy the new user experience.

Customer Satisfaction, Success, and Momentum

Customers are a core value of Workday, and we continue to focus our efforts on customer success. We consistently achieve a customer satisfaction rating of over 95%, as you know, and Aneel is excited to discuss this year's numbers on the big stage during the keynote. We'll also hear customers sharing stories through sessions and breakouts. Some of the brands you're going to see are Unum, WeWork, and Accuride – on how their businesses have transformed with Workday, and you’ll also hear Booz Allen Hamilton and Illumina articulate how analytics are shaping the world of HR. We'll hear some thought leadership as well, some really robust customer stories, and then we'll also share momentum across a variety of industries, including education and government.

Giving Back

With more than 8,000 attendees expected at Workday Rising this year, we knew we’d have a wonderful opportunity to rally together and give back to the Chicago community. We’ve partnered with Year Up, a non-profit organization that provides urban young adults with the skills, experience, and support that will empower them to reach their potential through professional careers and higher education. Among the Year Up students that have taken internships at Workday, more than 60 percent have become full-time employees. And with Chicago as our host city for Workday Rising this year, we’ll be donating $100,000 to Year Up Chicago.

We’re asking Workday Rising attendees to donate a piece of new or gently used professional clothing at the Innovation Exchange Expo. Year Up needs more donations for its career closets, as students are encouraged to project a professional image from the start of the program. Also, Workday Rising customer attendees will have the opportunity to mentor Year Up students on Thursday, October 12 in a mock-interview workshop scenario. We’ll also have plenty of Workday Giving and Doing activities, so be sure to keep an eye out for those in between sessions.

Dave’s Top Ten List

Sorry, but even inside the company, Dave’s Top Ten list is top secret stuff. We are all waiting with bated breath. Well, that’s one reason to definitely go to Chicago See you there!

Oracle Autonomy: A Giant Leap

In writing my last couple of books, Silicon Collar and SAP Nation, I have observed how hypocritical the IT industry has been about automation. AI, robotics, drones are good for customers but not in reducing tech labor? The worst offenders are outsourcers with their huge labor pools. Software vendors have been skittish about cannibalizing labor at these partners – for SAP Nation, the economic models I built showed a majority of costs in labor. Beyond economics, machines do dull, dirty, dangerous tasks much better than humans and we hate to admit it but tech does have a lot of repetitive work which would be better automated.

So, it is good to see Oracle announce at OpenWorld an autonomous database (version 18c) and semi-autonomous cyber security services.

Larry Ellison was at his professorial best as he explained concepts of machine learning and the promise of training computers with masses of data and gobs of computing power. The data center and IT/telecom infrastructure generates so much log data as Larry showed in one of his slides (click to enlarge)

And when you look at the trail from end user to network node to application accessed to database, you visualize the “big data” of potential security failures every minute in every organization.

Let's leverage this data to teach computers to provision, upgrade, tune, backup, patch themselves with minimal downtime and much more efficiently than humans can.

He used a carrot and stick approach.The carrot comes in the Oracle offer to run databases cheaper than even at Amazon and to do it with better SLAs. He demoed several workloads simulating customers in financial services, market research, insurance and retail. In each Oracle was faster and cheaper than Amazon’s performance. As he said early and often with sarcasm – you can only have it if you are willing to pay less for it

The stick came from repeated mentions of the shocking state of unpatched systems in IT world and the massive breach at Equifax and others like the Federal Office of Personnel Management. Humans do not do a good job patching systems, especially when they are mandated to reduce downtime. Why are we fighting the bad guys’ computer power with just our people power? 

Makes a lot of sense, but the autonomy will only be available in the Oracle Public Cloud or  the Cloud at Customer (a managed service from Oracle). I can see their reasoning – if Oracle is going to provide a SLA of 99.995% up-time it wants to control tightly the environment.

Personally, I would like to see the autonomous database also available on-premise or as an appliance (minus, of course, the SLA and the cloud pricing model). Here’s 3 reasons why:

a) Customers are extremely comfortable with Oracle’s database prowess, much less Oracle’s cloud infrastructure competency. 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. In 2-3 years, the comfort level will be much higher, so why not let customers get familiar with 18c in the meantime in their shops? Oracle could justify the customer investment by showing the savings in DBA labor and that of managed services, rather than what came across as Amazon bashing as Larry ran version after version of his demo workloads and showed savings with Oracle that way. 

b) Global companies are already struggling with changing data residence requirements around the world. A database in the cloud will require much more due diligence on their part.

c) Many customers are loathe to increase the lock-in large vendors like Oracle, SAP and IBM already have. SAP is trying to sell them databases, Oracle is now trying to sell them infrastructure services in addition. May seem trivial from a vendor point of view, but it is not from the CIO's because of bad behavior of large vendors with the lock-in they already have.

So, Oracle Autonomy is a giant leap forward for the industry. But it may need an even more giant leap of faith for customers. At least, in the near future.