I had the pleasure to attend Oracle CloudWorld in Los Angeles last week - it was a good opportunity to catch up on where Oracle's latest efforts around the cloud are.
The conference was part of a worldwide tour of CloudWorld conferences, the Los Angeles stop was the 2nd event, the whole series kicked off in Dubai. It looks like Dubai was well attended with 1500 participants, the Los Angeles event was probably a thousand attendees with many Oracle employees in the audience. I was a bit surprised given that this is the only CloudWorld event happening on the West Coast - and one of two in the US (New York being the other location on April 2nd).
Charlene Li (@charleneli) from Altimeter kicked off the event, with a good keynote on the effects of social. "Social will be like air" was the tag line to be expected from her previous work and presentations. She provided hands on advice with the 6 step plan to become social - which provided value to some in the audience. You can find her always interesting slides on slideshare, here.
After that it was up to Thomas Kurian - who I haven't seen speaking in a few years - and must say he has become a much improved presenter. He is also much more comfortable to speak about business applications than back then, which is great. Here are some tidbits from his keynote:
I attended presentation from the cloud integration, CRM, SRM and HCM tracks - and they were solid and informative, but lacked a little bit the glitz, as to be expected. There was a demo area - but I was expecting also some live demos in these tracks, instead mostly canned videos of demonstrations were shown. This is unfortunate as it degraded the overall pretty positive experience of the conference.
Takeaways from the small sessions:
The conference was part of a worldwide tour of CloudWorld conferences, the Los Angeles stop was the 2nd event, the whole series kicked off in Dubai. It looks like Dubai was well attended with 1500 participants, the Los Angeles event was probably a thousand attendees with many Oracle employees in the audience. I was a bit surprised given that this is the only CloudWorld event happening on the West Coast - and one of two in the US (New York being the other location on April 2nd).
Charlene Li (@charleneli) from Altimeter kicked off the event, with a good keynote on the effects of social. "Social will be like air" was the tag line to be expected from her previous work and presentations. She provided hands on advice with the 6 step plan to become social - which provided value to some in the audience. You can find her always interesting slides on slideshare, here.
After that it was up to Thomas Kurian - who I haven't seen speaking in a few years - and must say he has become a much improved presenter. He is also much more comfortable to speak about business applications than back then, which is great. Here are some tidbits from his keynote:
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| Thomas Kurian delivering keynote at Cloudworld Los Angeles via @psalinger |
- Oracle started 5 years ago on its journey to the cloud - which would make it 2008. That was when the original Fusion Apps were supposed to ship - not sure if Oracle wants to portray such a sequential timeline - but the dates fall in place.
- The subscription value of the Oracle cloud products exceeds 1B US$ and is growing at 35% yoy. This is a healthy growth rate and puts Oracle at par with pure cloud vendors. You may ask for the breakdown, how much of that is organic growth vs acquired revenue - but of course you won't get an answer.
- Kurian claimed that you can run your company now fully on Oracle Cloud applications - which is a key milestone. The question remains the functional richness of these applications vs the legacy 'Application Unlimited' products. But we got some data points:
- A significant increase of finance functionality in the cloud will occur in the near future as Kurian announced the 'soon to be' production of Hyperion in the cloud.
- HCM in the cloud is now localized to 11 countries and available for 7 languages. Remind me - where does Workday stand on this?
- The pending Eloqua acquisition will be a key functional building block for the Social Relationship Management (SRM) product family, which is completely cloud based... sometimes it's good to be late to the party.
- The format of the keynote was for Kurian to give a high level overview of a product family (Financials, HCM, Talent (wonder why separate them, but ok), CRM, SRM, followed by customer testimonials played in via video.
- I was pretty happy that Kurian led with the business apps, a top down approach to walk through the Oracle cloud portfolio - and only then came to the technology. In the past Oracle too often and in my view wrongly - would present 'bottom up' - starting with the datbase. No word of the database at this event, btw.
- Kurian mentioned that Oracle will announce a Storage Service soon - and I wonder how competitive that will be - but from a completeness perspective it's certainly needed.
- Flexibility was the key argument used by Kurian, with the same stack deployed inhouse or in the cloud,with the same management tools your technology users are already comfortable with. Later I learnt that 70% of the cloud code is also running on premise, which is good engineering practice, but begs the (of course unanswered question) what is in the other 30%.
I attended presentation from the cloud integration, CRM, SRM and HCM tracks - and they were solid and informative, but lacked a little bit the glitz, as to be expected. There was a demo area - but I was expecting also some live demos in these tracks, instead mostly canned videos of demonstrations were shown. This is unfortunate as it degraded the overall pretty positive experience of the conference.
Takeaways from the small sessions:
- Many companies have 'accidental' cloud architectures - someone buys something and the accident has happened. Then they try to fix things up.
- No timeline was given for the Taleo integration with the Fusion Apps / the Apps Unlimited products - no surprise.
- The RightNow UI looked dated and in need for an overhaul.
- Also no timeline for RightNow integration with Fusion - but incidents will be visible, and agents will see leads, opportunities etc.
- I was impressed by ambition, capability and scope of the SRM suite. Oracle seems to be serious in this area and is embedding social data and functions deep into Fusion. This could be a game changer years from now, when it comes to the social enablement of Fusion no longer being desirable and nice to have, but a must-have requirement.
- Ad Oracle's Cloud Products:
This is an impressive stack - both in scope and breadth - something nobody else - apart from maybe Microsoft - is undertaking right now. If Oracle manages to master the integration of the many acquired pieces, gets the functionality to a critical level while not loosing compelling TCO arguments - we are watching the ongoing work on the largest hardware-software engineering project out there. The synergies and benefits - once working - could be enormous. Till then there is a lot of hard work left for Oracle executives and engineers. - Ad Oracle's CloudWorld event:
If you want to come up to speed or catch up on the latest about Oracle's products - this is a day well invested. Personally I would have preferred more live software and live customers in attendance, but that's always a compromise at events of this type.