For two days this week Oracle gathered key industry analysts and bloggers for their yearly analyst relation summit. A good chance to checkout what has changed since the launch of the Cloudworld conference series, you find my takeaways from Cloudworld LA here:
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But at the end nothing really new from Ellison, he re-itereated that with cloud computing we are entering a new age of computing, kept comparing it to water and electrical utilities and that the disruption of the cloud brings a new set of competitors to Oracle. The hope hat Oracle may reveal something (publicly) about the storage plans (see Kurian at LA here), beyond the January webcast - did not materialize.
I wasn't really surprised by the engineered systems and cloud computing themes, but Oracle mentioning Big Data on a central slide is new. Already at Cloudworld CX was very prominent, so no surprise there - and social and mobile are table stakes these days ... though mobile has been more neglected by Oracle than by other players.
It was good to see that Oracle offered clear differentiators to the competition with the below slide:
And they are valid differentiators - nobody else is pursuing a similar ambitious and extensive engineered system strategy like Oracle. As a matter of fact, very few vendors can compete on engineered systems, as most likely competitors from the bottom up, IBM and HP, would have to partner extensively for higher level components, latest at the app level software. Consequently the same argument is valid for the software on Silicon argument.
And of course Oracle needs to offer all flavors of the cloud- public, private and hybrid - but so do Microsoft and IBM - equally including PaaS and IaaS. The end to end on the CX side is an ambition, I am sure a lot of vendors would argue Oracle is not yet end to end there. And Oracle would be fools if they didn't inject BI and Social everywhere they could. On the latter the absence of mobile is notable and remains an area where Oracle needs to improve and catch up.
And Oracle remains committed to R&D, Bob Evans mentioned that over $15B being spent on R&D in the last three years - impressive, but it will more matter what Oracle can show for it. In the interesting statement section was also the labeling of the Sun acquisition as the most strategic (ok) and most profitable (surprise) acquisition ever. Given the negative impact of the lower margin Sun sever business that Oracle needed to digest and dissolve, the additional R&D needed after Sun under-invested (see Oracle earnings call) - remains one I would like Oracle to back up. I am sure expectations go into that direction, when the whole engineered systems strategy and the software on silicon strategy will materialize successfully. But that's too early to call.
Even though one can validly argue that Oracle is so late to the mobile party that most food is gone already, Oracle seems to have decided to really show up now. And with the typical Oracle intensity...
It's good to see Oracle getting serious about mobile, given the number of enterprise users getting to use their smartphones to get work done. Later on the applications side there was also the mobile first claim, but I haven't seen an enterprise application vendor really putting that into action. Mobile remains a key extension, but not the first design platform point for Oracle, SAP et al.
Kurian also gave a preview of planned in memory applications, some of the them - like next best action, which may be the older Siebel / Six Sigma offerings revamped on the new in memory platform. Certainly Oracle discovers in memory late, later than SAP - but the announced applications hit the right tone in terms of scope and content.
Not surprisingly Oracle sees BigData as holistic offering that spans across engineered systems, technology and applications, that acquire, store, process and analyze data. I was wondering what Oracle's relationship to Hadoop would be - coexistence or uptake - but it looks that the RDBMS DNA was stronger and Kurian described scale out processing on Hadoop clusters. But the RDBMS SQL engine is supposed to work seamlessly across traditional RDBMS storage and Hadoop - which would be a big win for existing applications and query productivity. Kurian thinks, that over time the efficiency of the SQL processing across hybrid clusters will be a key success factor in the BigData market.
Oracle's view on big data looks pretty complete, though I miss some business applications flavor on it - the BI applications are certainly there with Bi Foundation, Endeca, CEP - but no ETA mentioned:
The Oracle BI application portfolio remains beyond comprehensive:
Chris Leone presented the Fusion HCM apps, and I was impressive to see, that he demoed himsefl, a good sign of a hands-on executive. Of course he claimed that Oracle has the broadest suite of HR and Talent Management in the cloud. [I heard this before, ah,yes right at Inforum2013]. And not surprisingly, the claim of mobile first was the guideline to the new Oracle user interface. As Leone demoed from an iPad, that gave the whole claim significant substance. You can check the new UI out with TapMobile here. And of course, no HCM presentation post 2011 without mentioning flight risk - to be tamed with proper predictive analytics.
Also related to HCM - an interesting data point on Peoplesoft was, that has 15M users and pays 7.5M, more than I thought at this stage in the product life cycle. Paco Aubrejan even made the claim that Oracle's business with Peoplesoft is growing. The key investment areas for Peoplesoft HCM are mobile, in memory and lifecycle management.
That concluded Day 1 - and we got some interesting Twitter visualization of Day 1 - looks like @mkrigsman and @alanlepo were the busiest tweeters:
In typical Oracle fashion customer experience needs to permeate across the whole applications portfolio, as the following slide portrays:
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Oracle keeps closing events like these with bringing Doug Kehring on stage, who runs the Oracle acquisition machine. His insights are always valuable, very few professionals have been involved in up to a 100 acquisitions in the last 10 years. Interesting was the insight, that employees of acquired companies, who stick around more than 12 months, are usually with Oracle for good. The great value of having Kehring present is, that the audience always leaves with the confidence that they speak to an executive running a very smooth, proven acquisition machine. Which results in practically none of the usual acquisition noise around retention, roadmaps, integration etc. that come up around acquisitions. Having a dedicated acquisition team has definitively paid off for Oracle.
This meeting hasn't changed my analysis from Cloudworld. We are witnessing the largest integrated engineering project across multiple product categories since a long time, maybe ever. Only IBM and Microsoft can attempt the same - but they - maybe wisely - aren't. The scope is tremendous, and with releasing a new product every workday for a year - a feat that Oracle has achieved - gives a sense of the complexity of the undertaking.
But Oracle has decided to shoulder this load and it will be very interesting to see the further progression of this mega project, that has the potential of transforming the enterprise IT industry on virtually every layer and every aspect. An update on the progress is always welcome, and the current status is promising. But Oracle still has a lot of road to cover - great high tech products just take... time.
[Disclosure: I did not attend the AR conference - but only followed public available sources, mainly Twitter - you can find the Twitter Stream here.]
Larry on tap and nothing new from the top
Similar as at Cloudworld events, Larry Ellison was there by video, which sparked some disappointment by the audience. But given the many faux cloud comments Oracle got from the analyst community in the last year - I think it may even have been a wise move by Oracle AR not to have Larry there in person, but on canned message. If it was a PR strategy it succeeded as there were no negative tweets on Oracle's strategy..But at the end nothing really new from Ellison, he re-itereated that with cloud computing we are entering a new age of computing, kept comparing it to water and electrical utilities and that the disruption of the cloud brings a new set of competitors to Oracle. The hope hat Oracle may reveal something (publicly) about the storage plans (see Kurian at LA here), beyond the January webcast - did not materialize.
6 general themes
A lengthy presentation by Bob Evans, that didn't receive too much love from the audience in Twittersphere, at least made clear the 6 major themes that Oracle is working on (and are new vs Cloudworld): |
| Slide from Twitter |
It was good to see that Oracle offered clear differentiators to the competition with the below slide:
 |
| Slide from Twitter |
And of course Oracle needs to offer all flavors of the cloud- public, private and hybrid - but so do Microsoft and IBM - equally including PaaS and IaaS. The end to end on the CX side is an ambition, I am sure a lot of vendors would argue Oracle is not yet end to end there. And Oracle would be fools if they didn't inject BI and Social everywhere they could. On the latter the absence of mobile is notable and remains an area where Oracle needs to improve and catch up.
And Oracle remains committed to R&D, Bob Evans mentioned that over $15B being spent on R&D in the last three years - impressive, but it will more matter what Oracle can show for it. In the interesting statement section was also the labeling of the Sun acquisition as the most strategic (ok) and most profitable (surprise) acquisition ever. Given the negative impact of the lower margin Sun sever business that Oracle needed to digest and dissolve, the additional R&D needed after Sun under-invested (see Oracle earnings call) - remains one I would like Oracle to back up. I am sure expectations go into that direction, when the whole engineered systems strategy and the software on silicon strategy will materialize successfully. But that's too early to call.
Engineered Systems
John Fowler's session was under NDA - so not much to comment... but a few tidbits leaked out:- Oracle has turned the corner on the Sun investment (ok see Q3 earnings call, too)
- There are only about 5000 engineered systems out worldwide, and over 800 sold in Q3 this FY.
- Looks like no date has been given for when a Sparc based appliance will feature the Oracle flagship RDBMS. My guess is Oracle is waiting for 12c to be mature enough to be put onto silicon.
- Not surprisingly the design team for the new engineered systems include DBMS, middleware and applications.
- It looks like Oracle was able to change the TCO of running Peoplesoft significantly, without changing a line of code, but only the underlying hardware. That sounds like a very cool proof point for the power of engineered systems and would give Oracle's Applicaton Unlimited customers a lot more runway.
- Softbank is the largest Exadata user in Japan, European Telcos have similar objective, but are more conservative and are lagging in adoption.
- Fowler claimed, that Oracle's engineered systems will be available in a matter of days instead of the month long testing to put a custom made system together today. And Oracle will roll up thousands of patches into a single patch - across all the components:
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| Slide from Twitter |
- While in the past Oracle created purpose built engineered systems (ExaData, ExaLogic etc), bringing the whole stack together in silicon will allow to build only one general purpose box. It would be very interesting to understand how elastic the different applications will be able to be run on that future general purpose system. So the appliances will stay around - but the generic loads will be shouldered by a general purpose appliance running on SPARC SuperClusters.
- The next slide describes the ambitious saving engineered system can garner in a heterogeneous system landscape - including SAP. Which is an interesting aspect that Oracle would just see SAP on Oracle RDBMS as just another application, similarly what they have done with Peoplesoft. That could be a lot of very compelling revenue for Oracle and very bad news for IBM and HP, given the server hungry SAP landscapes:
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| Slide from Twitter |
Now to the software
Next up was Thomas Kurian, who repeated a well polished and smooth presentation, similar to Cloudworld. What was new is the staggering amount of products Oracle has released in the last 4 quarters... 270... that more than one system per workday, if you work Monday till Friday. Staggering. Begs a lot of questions how to handle, scale and digest this... not just for the analyst audience - for the whole ecosystem.
Kurian also had a nice line with: Cloud today is not just infrastructure, but an organizing taxonomy to have a conversation today. Very true... and he offered a definition of cloud with: elastic pools of compute, storage and network resources. I couldn't agree more. Cloud is all about resource elasticity.
Kurian also reconfirmed the social and CX software are the key areas of focus for business applications at this moment, my impressions at Cloudworld in LA were similar. The below slide frames nicely how the red stack translates into products on the right side:
 |
| Slide from Twitter |
On the cloud computing side, Kurian already talked about the Nimbula acquisition (my take on it here), the Nimbula Cloud Director was already in the slides. which gives Oracle a lot of more credibility in the true cloud field. Notably - there was not a single false cloud mention in the twitter stream... something you can find abundantly around the last Oracle Open World.
And Oracle's cloud strategy seems to now have settled, as a full range IaaS, PaaS and SaaS offerings, encompassing the Social Relationship Management platform and with the complete deployment flexibility - in the public, in the private and in the hybrid cloud.
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| Slide from Twitter |
Needless to say, Oracle did not address if there would be any interest to run the Oracle cloud on other hardware than the Oracle hardware.The public Cloud offering looks complete - with the additions of an Application Store - since CloudWorld LA:
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| Slide from Twitter |
And Oracle is serious in setting up data centers around the globe, with 7 already up and running and 4 more planned, with Singapore and Japan as mentioned specifically as future sites.
Up in the red stack and we get to the SaaS part, no changes here, the public cloud offering supports global HR, Talent Management, Enterprise Planning, Financial Planning, Enterprise Resource Planning, Marketing, Sales and Service.
Mobile finds love
Even though one can validly argue that Oracle is so late to the mobile party that most food is gone already, Oracle seems to have decided to really show up now. And with the typical Oracle intensity...
 |
| Slide from Twitter |
Oracle talks in memory now
And finally - or not surprisingly anymore, Oracle addressed the in memory trend. Of course with exploiting processor, L1 & L2 cache, memory architectures, the engineered system mantra applied to in memory. The surprise to me was that 12c will ship with in memory capabilities in a month (or so) and a column store (no more details) will ship in 12 months. Interestingly Oracle has already been working on in memory apps and showed 3 customer examples under NDA. It's not clear how the Oracle in memory strategy will materialize in regards of its platform, as the option are the soon to be released 12c, Coherence and TimesTen.
 |
| Slide from Twitter |
Kurian also gave a preview of planned in memory applications, some of the them - like next best action, which may be the older Siebel / Six Sigma offerings revamped on the new in memory platform. Certainly Oracle discovers in memory late, later than SAP - but the announced applications hit the right tone in terms of scope and content.
Big Data
One of the first times we have seen Thomas Kurian / Oracle speaking about BigData and it would be interesting. Kurian offered (a good) definition of BigData being characterized by 4 Vs - with volume, velocity, variety and value.Not surprisingly Oracle sees BigData as holistic offering that spans across engineered systems, technology and applications, that acquire, store, process and analyze data. I was wondering what Oracle's relationship to Hadoop would be - coexistence or uptake - but it looks that the RDBMS DNA was stronger and Kurian described scale out processing on Hadoop clusters. But the RDBMS SQL engine is supposed to work seamlessly across traditional RDBMS storage and Hadoop - which would be a big win for existing applications and query productivity. Kurian thinks, that over time the efficiency of the SQL processing across hybrid clusters will be a key success factor in the BigData market.
Oracle's view on big data looks pretty complete, though I miss some business applications flavor on it - the BI applications are certainly there with Bi Foundation, Endeca, CEP - but no ETA mentioned:
 |
| Slide from Twitter |
The Oracle BI application portfolio remains beyond comprehensive:
 |
| Slide from Twitter |
Time for Applications
And then Kurian was off to applications. CX featured prominently, which he claims is the single biggest investment in applications at Oracle. It wasn't clear if this was ongoing, currently happening investment or cumulative investment in form of purchase prices for RightNow and eloqua being added up. Kurian offered a neat little customer management fact, that back in 1996 a disgruntled customer would only reach 8-12 people on average, today with Facebook even a recluse user reaches about 1750. |
| Slide from Twitter |
Fusion Apps Update
When it came to Fusion Oracle revealed that over 400 customers are now on Fusion, about 150 were added later and the majority is on the SaaS price list. Steve Miranda then clarified further, that of the 150 new there were about 60-65 in CRM, same numbers for HCM and the rest in ERP. Almost all existing customers moving to Fusion, no new logos.Chris Leone presented the Fusion HCM apps, and I was impressive to see, that he demoed himsefl, a good sign of a hands-on executive. Of course he claimed that Oracle has the broadest suite of HR and Talent Management in the cloud. [I heard this before, ah,yes right at Inforum2013]. And not surprisingly, the claim of mobile first was the guideline to the new Oracle user interface. As Leone demoed from an iPad, that gave the whole claim significant substance. You can check the new UI out with TapMobile here. And of course, no HCM presentation post 2011 without mentioning flight risk - to be tamed with proper predictive analytics.
Also related to HCM - an interesting data point on Peoplesoft was, that has 15M users and pays 7.5M, more than I thought at this stage in the product life cycle. Paco Aubrejan even made the claim that Oracle's business with Peoplesoft is growing. The key investment areas for Peoplesoft HCM are mobile, in memory and lifecycle management.
That concluded Day 1 - and we got some interesting Twitter visualization of Day 1 - looks like @mkrigsman and @alanlepo were the busiest tweeters:
 |
| Courtesy of @satyakr - Satya Krishnawasamy |
Day 2
The second day started with ... customer experience... Oracle gives the topic a lot of room, very good. The topic was kicked off telling a nice story on how customers journey across channels. |
| Slide from Twitter |
In typical Oracle fashion customer experience needs to permeate across the whole applications portfolio, as the following slide portrays:
Oracle garnered the CX pitch with the classic story of only 1% of customers being happy with servides, 89% would switch and walk if they had a option. Makes a very good ROI case for your CX investments. Reduce churn / likeliness to switch by x%, this is y$s - make it a no-brainer.
It was also interesting to see the ACME Packets acquisition (my take here) being featured in a Telco example, where the telcos are trying to make sense of all the customer usage data.
MySQL thrives
There were a lot of concerns around the fate of mySQL as a result of Oracle's Sun acquisition. The fear was, that Oracle would squash the open source competition to protect the Oracle RDBMS offerings. But Oracle was smart to isolate the mySQL team from the RDBMS development teams, by having it effectively report to Ed Screven (who reports to Larry Ellison) and not to Andy Mendelsohn. A move that really safe guarded mySQL and Oracle now can prove by track record that the opposite is the case - mySQL is thriving - even though outside of all the redstack offerings and plans. According to Screven there are double the amount of developers and triple the amount of QA professionals working on mySQL than at the time of the acquisition. On the downside - throwing outside the redsack built by Kurian's team - also meets to wait for some goodies - so an mySQL appliance is on the list according to Screven, but no firm dates yet.
Close with Acquisitions
Oracle keeps closing events like these with bringing Doug Kehring on stage, who runs the Oracle acquisition machine. His insights are always valuable, very few professionals have been involved in up to a 100 acquisitions in the last 10 years. Interesting was the insight, that employees of acquired companies, who stick around more than 12 months, are usually with Oracle for good. The great value of having Kehring present is, that the audience always leaves with the confidence that they speak to an executive running a very smooth, proven acquisition machine. Which results in practically none of the usual acquisition noise around retention, roadmaps, integration etc. that come up around acquisitions. Having a dedicated acquisition team has definitively paid off for Oracle.
MyPOV
This meeting hasn't changed my analysis from Cloudworld. We are witnessing the largest integrated engineering project across multiple product categories since a long time, maybe ever. Only IBM and Microsoft can attempt the same - but they - maybe wisely - aren't. The scope is tremendous, and with releasing a new product every workday for a year - a feat that Oracle has achieved - gives a sense of the complexity of the undertaking.
But Oracle has decided to shoulder this load and it will be very interesting to see the further progression of this mega project, that has the potential of transforming the enterprise IT industry on virtually every layer and every aspect. An update on the progress is always welcome, and the current status is promising. But Oracle still has a lot of road to cover - great high tech products just take... time.
[Disclosure: I did not attend the AR conference - but only followed public available sources, mainly Twitter - you can find the Twitter Stream here.]