I must admit I did a double take when I read this from Bob Evans
"On top of that, Ellison mapped out Oracle’s desire to offer a massive portfolio of industry-specific solutions that fuse (no pun intended) the broad capabilities of his Fusion enterprise apps with unique industry-specific capabilities for vertical markets."
So I checked out the video where Rob Tarkoff, EVP Oracle CX Cloud and Oracle Data Cloud banters with Larry about the future of CX. From 22.06 to 29.55 they do talk about verticals, particularly around telecom. Larry adds "more to come" as he paints a vision of a "closed loop" enterprise connecting the front and back office and everything in-between.
Since the early 2000s, when Oracle went on its acquisition binge I have waited for them to start to dominate with industry applications. Retek, Portal, Primavera, I-Flex, Opower, ClearTrial, JD Edwards and many others gave Oracle a nice foothold in many large sectors of the economy.
At a personal level, Larry knows so much about oceanography, architecture, aviation and so much more - he is a Polymath. He helped Steve Jobs launch Apple's retail foray and look how well it has blossomed.
While they sell plenty of database and horizontal financial, hcm and CX applications to every sector, industry specific applications have been not been as prominent in Oracle marketing.
In April 2018, I wrote about Netsuite's industry approach
The reality is the verticals NetSuite and its cloud ERP and CRM peers have developed “books of record” for leave massive sectors such as utilities, insurance, hospitality and healthcare mostly untouched. That’s a lot of white space for new entrants to target.
In March 2019 I wrote about Oracle verticals
I would love to see details - to me vertical applications do operational stuff - merchandising in retail, claims processing in insurance, net metering in utilities, support robotics and wearables on the shop floor etc. If it has those, why is Oracle not aggressively showcasing these capabilities?
I hope they are much more serious this time. During the pandemic, in all the C level interviews I have been conducting (see index here ), I have heard how vertical applications have helped some companies survive and others to thrive. They mention applications like:
- Telemedicine in healthcare
- PPP loan processing capabilities and mobile apps in banking
- Distance learning in higher education
- Drive-thru processing in food service and retail
- eCommerce and robotic warehousing in retail
- Last mile delivery in groceries, restaurants even car buying
- Remote home buying and digital mortgages in real estate
Should Vinnie Vertical (as some call me for constantly asking about industry functionality) be excited about Oracle Industries this time around? I would like to catalog their progress like I did with 3 posts on Salesforce Industries in the Analyst Cam series couple of weeks ago.
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