Amazon, Salesforce reportedly moving off Oracle: The Oracle database lies at the core of untold numbers of applications and enterprise IT environments, including those at Amazon and Salesforce. But that reportedly may not be the case for good, as both companies have active efforts underway to move off Oracle to alternatives, according to a report in the Information.
The progress has been fairly significant at Amazon; it has moved its customer master and order master databases to a NoSQL platform, according to the Information's report. Salesforce has been working on an Oracle alternative with the code-name Sayonara, which was first reported by Fortune in mid-2016. It has been rumored for years prior to that report Salesforce was investigating a move onto PostgreSQL.
POV: The report comes at an interesting time for Oracle, which is about to launch the newest version of its database. The update will give the platform the ability to patch itself on the fly; Oracle CTO Larry Ellison has dubbed it a "self-driving" database, playing off the interest in autonomous vehicles. Oracle believes the new version will spark a wave of workload migrations to Oracle's cloud.
Salesforce may be working on an Oracle exit plan, but will be tied to the platform for the next several years. It signed a nine-year contract renewal with Oracle in 2013 that was reportedly worth $300 million; even so, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said at the time that it would cut his database costs in half. (Notably, a source told the Information that Salesforce intends to be completely off of Oracle by 2023.)
Ellison hasn't been shy about bragging how Salesforce and Amazon, both fierce competitors of Oracle's, pay millions of dollars to use its software. If either company succeeds in moving substantially away from Oracle's database, it will provide a case study for other large enterprises in how to pull such a task off.
It might be easier for Salesforce to make a move off Oracle, as it can incrementally shift subscribers and instances, says Constellation VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. But at the same time, the type of features Oracle is promising in the new database version are just what cloud vendors want, since they can reduce or even eliminate labor costs and human error, Mueller adds.
The ad-blocker arms race heats up: The war over online ads, with users and ad-blocking browser extensions on one side, and marketers and publishers on the other, reached new heights in 2017. One of the biggest developments was Google's decision to add a native ad-blocker to its Chrome browser, which has more than 60 percent market share. Google's blocker will go into action on Feb. 15; it will block only ads deemed overly intrusive under a set of standards laid out by the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group that includes Google, Facebook and other companies that are highly dependent on advertising revenue.
But while Google's move was high-profile, thousands of the world's top websites have been waging a quieter war against ad-blocking technologies, researchers at the University of Iowa have determined. The researchers developed a system that analyzed the top 10,000 websites on Internet traffic monitor Alexa, and found that 30.5 percent of of them employed anti-adblocking code, a much higher percentage—up to 52 times as many—than previous studies uncovered.
POV: The researchers' paper goes on to detail programming methods aimed at thwarting anti-adblockers. Overall, their work raises provocative questions about a pressing issue for not just large Internet companies but all brands, as well as their customers. As the researchers note, the adblocker versus anti-adblocker war will likely escalate as the year unfolds:
It is crucial that adblockers are able to keep up with anti-adblockers. Moreover, the increasing popularity of adblocking has already led to various reform efforts within the online advertising industry to improve ads ...However, to keep up the pressure on publishers and advertisers in the long term, we believe it is crucial that adblockers keep pace with anti-adblockers in the rapidly escalating technological arms race.
Constellation believes that Google's native Chrome adblocker can have the weight and influence needed to spark significant improvements in the quality of Internet advertising. Companies making investments in online ad programs deserve to get a fair shot at a return on them, but not at the sake of user experience and brand integrity.
Tech conference season kicks off—what's on tap: After a quiet period over the holiday break, the tech conference calendar will be busy this month. Here's a look at the top events and what to expect.
CES: First up is the massive Consumer Electronics Show, which starts Jan. 8 in Las Vegas. The show will feature the usual raft of gadget and audiovisual product announcements, but the biggest conversations will be around around smart cities, autonomous vehicle technology, IoT and the arrival of 5G networks.
NRF 2018: The retail industry's biggest and most important conference kicks off Jan. 14 in New York. Expect a heavier-than-ever emphasis on technology during this year's event, particuarly in areas such as AI and robotics, which will have direct impact on the in-store customer experience.
World Economic Forum: The annual gathering of world leaders takes place Jan. 23-26 in Davos, Switzerland, under the theme "Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World." While not a pure technology conference by any means, Davos is nonetheless an important setting for discussions on the digital economy.