Oracle held an analyst summit in New York this week, where Oracle executives including CEO Mark Hurd and EVP of product development Thomas Kurian gave attendees a sweeping and in-depth overview of the vendor's road maps and strategies for 2016 and beyond. The following is some key takeways of the event from members of Constellation's analyst team, who were in the house.
Moving the Needle on IaaS and PaaS: POV from Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller
Oracle is making progress across the board, but the event's content mostly stayed away from hardware and database in favor of discussions on cloud infrastructure and platform, Mueller says. "Oracle has come closer in the conversation on IaaS to AWS, Google and Microsoft on an executive level, which shows the maturation of the portfolio," Mueller says. "It's also clear Oracle will not only wait for existing customers to move to Oracle Cloud—at some point—but will aggressively go after workloads from other vendors."
Oracle's nested hypervisor capabilities allow workloads to be transferred from AWS, Google, VMWare and soon Microsoft Azure, Mueller adds.
Meanwhile, on the SaaS application front, Oracle is making steady progress, Mueller says. "The manufacturing capabilities are coming around, and this will offer Oracle customers and prospects a complete large scale enterprise suite running in the cloud."
Inside Oracle's DaaS (Data As A Service) Strategy: POV from Constellation Research VP and Principal Analyst Doug Henschen
Oracle has built out its Data Cloud and DaaS portfolio through a series of acquisitions, including BlueKai, DataLogix and most recently, AddThis.
"The promise of Data Cloud is that you bring in your CRM file and get a better understanding of what your customers do on other sites and on competitor’s sites based on insights from second-party and third-party data," Henschen says. "The Data Cloud can also help you model and predict customer behavior based on this holistic view, not just the customer’s limited interactions with your company."
At this week's analyst event, Oracle made clear that its ambitions for data enrichment extend beyond marketing, with Kurian specifically noting sales, service, commerce and loyalty management as future areas of interest, Henschen adds.
That said, while Oracle's long-term vision "is broad and ambitious, I don’t think we’ll see Oracle Data Cloud services moving much beyond marketing in 2016, as there’s much to do just in that domain," Henschens says. "For starters, Oracle will have to digest the AddThis acquisition, bringing that data into the Data Cloud. But beyond that, Oracle execs tell me they’re working on beefing up social data services and B2B data services, areas where Salesforce has strength. Those efforts could bring additional acquisitions."
Oracle's competitors aren't standing still, "as Amazon, IBM and Microsoft are all working on analysis services as well as data services," Henschen notes. "Given the scarcity of data-science talent and the pressure to act on data in a timely way, many companies may want to skip buying data and doing in-house analysis and go directly to insights as a service."
Leading with UX Should Be An Oracle Imperative: POV from Constellation Research VP and Principal Analyst Dr. Natalie Petouhoff
The final presentation of Oracle's analyst day focused on its efforts to improve application user interfaces. While the presentation showcased a series of attractive UX innovations, Oracle's emphasis on this area seemed light in comparison to the amount of time spent on IaaS and PaaS, Petouhoff says, and that was a mistake.
"You can say you have all the machinery and you have the big guns, but its important to say it's pretty too," she says. "Engineers are really looking at features and functions. They're not looking at usability."
Oracle applications historically have struggled to deliver a satisfactory user experience, although work to turn that around began as the vendor developed its Fusion Applications. "They've taken a long time to get to this place," Petouhoff says. "This should be front and center."
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