With one of the largest - if not the largest - user conference dawning on us in the less than a week - Oracle OpenWorld - starting September 22nd in Moscone Center in San Francisco, I thought it would be good to get the topics sorted that we all would like to know more when returning from the event.
[This post is trying to follow the structure of my May blog post about What I would like SAP to address this Sapphire... and my recent blog post about What I would like Workday to address this Workday Rising that, if interested - you can respectively find here and here.]
The Future
Despite some recent earnings challenges, Oracle has been plowing ahead on the formulated vision of becoming something like the IBM of last century for the 21st century. That is not the IBM that is moving strongly in the direction of professional services, but the traditional post World War II IBM, that built integrated systems starting with the hardware, over the operating system, development tools and sometimes even applications. Oracle is trying to achieve the same with a number of acquisitions, labeling much of that as engineered systems and combining that with its traditional software products in the area of database, middleware and applications.
And the vision - as we have written before - is compelling - as complexity in the necessary system layers has increased since the early IBM days, making the value proposition even more interesting - but the creation of such an offering also more challenging. The question is - can Oracle tame all this moving parts and bring them together to market in a compelling pre-integrated - designed together as Oracle may want to call it - way, that gets significant traction with customers. This has happened partially with the Oracle Exa-Machines, but they have not really taken off. We will have to see what progress Oracle can convincingly report in a few days.
Fusion Time...?
One similar key milestone and test case for Oracle's ability to deliver on the vision is Fusion. Originally Fusion was supposed to ship in 2008 - we know the manifold reasons for delays - the question is, when will Oracle feel that Fusion is good enough to really switch marketing, sales, services and channel efforts over to Fusion. Recently Oracle for the first time started to promote Fusion applications with its weekly, front page Wall Street Journal ad - which could be a soft indicator.
But the Fusion story is turning a little like the fairy tale off the rabbit and the tortoise, with Fusion never quite getting there. And ironically - it has even helped Oracle to keep a low profile on Fusion as I blogged here. But at some point it will have to get there - and it will be key to take the pulse where Fusion stands in the 2nd half of 2013.
State of Apps Unlimited
The state of HCM
And Oracle will also have to address how the more conventional Taleo functionalty will be enhanced and make room form some 21st century talent management functionality. With pretty much all talent management vendors building recruitment - it's going to be important to see how Oracle will make sure it is not left behind here.
The state of CRM
Similar like with Taleo for HCM - Oracle faces the challenge to integrate RightNow and eloqua - and though they are on different levels in regards of being close to best practices - it will be key to see what updates in regards of new functionality Oracle will have. The flavor between integration needs of newly acquired products with the exiting install base products vs the building of new functionality will be key test of palate for the CRM connoisseur at OpenWorld.
Will social make a plunge?
We have given Oracle consistently high marks in regards of putting the Oracle Social Network as a social foundation under its products. The uniformity and base level availability across products is the charme here. It will be key to see Oracle has made strides to productize OSN as a standalone product offering.
Less quiet on Middleware
Oracle has been using and marketing Fusion Middleware a lot in the early Fusion days. More recently it has gotten more quiet in this area and it will be interesting to see if Oracle will revive this product category with corresponding investments this OpenWorld. We know it's close to the heart of development leader Thomas Kurian, being his original area of responsibility.
12c promises - delivered?
At last years OpenWorld Oracle made a number of announcements in regards of Oracle 12c. And Oracle has shipped and delivered 12c - but some of the announcements needs some more backup or at least qualification. The most ardent one being the claim to be able to run significantly more database instances on the same piece of hardware, a fashion of multi-tenancy seen the Oracle way - from the database up the stack. More on it can be found here.
It will also be interesting to see, if Oracle will have some announcements and work for the other products in the database family, one member - mysql - has been getting less love and attention in the customer community in the past, mostly replaced my Maria DB - so it will be interesting to see if Oracle is cutting losses her - or will hold against the current exodus of mysql users.
In Memory and BigData
No doubt Oracle has gone from ridiculing HANA to reacting to HANA in the last 12 months. The next version of 12c is supposed to prove an in memory option / capability - and it will be interesting to see, how Oracle will position this and deliver the new version / capability.
Equally BigData is a threat to the Oracle database empire. It will be interesting to see how Oracle will address and embrace the challenge BigData / NoSQL databases do pose to its existing products. One has to be no fortuneteller to predict a co-existence model.
Cloud
After deriding the cloud as the latest marketing fashion term - Oracle has gone from critique to believer - recently even delivering Oracle Cloud Application Foundation. It will be interesting to see how many public vs private cloud announcements Oracle will make at OpenWorld and what it's interest and appetite in the datacenter capacity game are. At 13k virtual machines and 70 PB of storage Oracle is one of the medium size data center players. Like many competitors - Oracle has gotten into the data center game through acquisition and is now looking at rationalizing and monetizing data center resource that it inherited from the Taleo, RightNow, eloqua etc acquisitions. What's Oracle doing with the recent Nimbula acquisition?
Java
And let's not forget on the Java side, that this is also the worldwide gathering of the Java community - the most used programming language around the globe and thus developer community with over 9 million developers. And Oracle has recently expanded enterprise support with Java EE 7 - the first release under complete Oracle stewardship.
With that under the belt it will be interesting to watch if Oracle will move into a PaaS play - and what else the milestones and features in regards of EE 8 will be.
Industry
Last but not least - Oracle has been investing and acquiring in the vertical space. No vendor has really been able to successfully provide vertical functionalty on top of a rapidly moving horizontal core - a challenge Oracle equally needs to address. And for instance after the recent acquisition of ACME packets - it has gone more or less quiet.
More mega partnerships?
Oracle kept customer, ecosystem and media on their toes with 12c and announcements of partnerships with Microsoft, Netsuite and salesforce.com. With the latter getting the most coverage - so it will be interesting to see how especially the Microsoft and salesforce.com partnerships will be featured at OpenWorld. Will we see bromance on stage or was this a one time fling? Will we see other mega announcements?
MyPOV
This OpenWorld is key for Oracle as it's going to be an important event to provide updates on the many, many things Oracle is working on. It will be interesting to see all of these project and products on a converging path - or not (yet). Regardless Oracle has a lot - if not too much - in its plate. We will know more in 10 days...
P.S. Many thanks to my colleagues Alan Lepovitz (@AlanLepo), Brent Kelly (@ebkell), Bruce Daley (@BruceDaley), Esteban Kolsky (@EKolsky), Frank Scavo (@FScavo), Gavin Heaton (@ServantofChaos) and Steve Wilson (@Steve_Lockstep) for providing some valuable suggestions and topics for this post - much appreciated! And if you don't follow them - time to start following them!