We have the opportunity to attend this year’s edition of Oracle’s mega user conference, Oracle OpenWorld, held in San Francisco from September 18th to 23rd 2016. Expect it to be a big event on all levels, attendees, press releases, news, lines, exhibitor and parties. 
So catch the video of the key areas to watch:
 

No time to watch here is the one slide summary:

Want more detail, then read on:

Thomas Kurian splits the Oracle cloud offerings usually in 4 areas, so we follow his lead:

IaaS re-launch, better work this time! Oracle has had a few pivots and re-starts on IaaS, which all did not help, given the relatively late start to IaaS. Kudos all the way to Ellison to acknowledge this last OOW. In the earnings call Ellison hinted that this is ‘version 2 of IaaS – we will see how well the nested hypervisor as well as the Ravello capability can attract enterprise load. Oracle keeps designing at a price point that it maintains is lower than Amazon AWS. It probably has to attract enterprise load and get more scale for its offering.

PaaS – what will be Oracle’s path to PaaS? – There are two extremes on how PaaS vendors go to market at the moment – the Chinese menu approach (e.g. AWS) or the more packaged, this is the way to do it (e.g. Pivotal, IBM) approach. The former caters more to developers, the latter caters more to enterprise executives who want to take the mystery, myth and risk out of PaaS delivered projects. Oracle to a certain point needs to cater to both, as both user groups are its customers, but we think that it needs to come to a more packaged offering going forward. We also are curious on the low code / no code capabilities that Oracle has been working on now for a while.

DaaS – Customer Adoption Check – Kurian has been one of the earliest and most consistent vendor executives to talk about DaaS. We know that Oracle and its leaders get the value proposition, and Oracle has been acquiring companies along the way to become a DaaS player, on top of its native DB, Analytics and BI DNA. The Oracle Identity Graph is a very valuable information offering, now it comes to what Oracle can do to leverage and monetize it beyond the traditional use cases of the recent acquisitions.

SaaS – Different Maturity – Different things to look for  – With little doubt the most mature and advanced Oracle SaaS automation area is HCM. For HCM it will all be for Oracle to show how it will differentiate its product going forward, and create compelling value for more market success to both customers and prospects. For both Finance and CRM Cloud, the question is more on customer adoption, as both products have made progress, but have to reach more market penetration before they are on a similar level like HCM. And finally SCM / Manufacturing, which is traditionally late with Oracle, here the question will be how real the first customers on core manufacturing, order management and more advanced purchasing scenarios are.

 

MyPOV

It will be another busy event this year at OOW, all eyes will be on the new IaaS capabilities. I have asked Oracle executives for year what will happen when this is fixed, and what the repercussions will be for the higher levels of the Applications stack… and the answer was always the technically correct one – all is encapsulated well with APIs, programmatically…. And that’s good – now we will have to see how smooth PaaS, DaaS and SaaS products will be able to take advantage of the new IaaS platform. 

Stay tuned for more updates from Oracle OpenWorld, fist look on Twitter, then Video – and if you are there – try to catch me in real life – nothing beats that!