Observations of Oracle World 2013

Constellation Research

J. Bruce Daley is a former vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, Inc.  , Title: Big Ideas Age Before Beauty Before there can be a wholesale conversion to the Cloud legacy applications must be converted. This will take decades and not every vendor has taken this obstacle into account when projecting growth. Professional Services Firms Need a Recurring Revenue Model The services business has a lot of advantages but one big disadvantage in that you are always going out of business. Some organizations are using the Cloud to offer clients new ways to spend money than just time-and-materials or fixed price projects. ...

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Photo credit: Jim Bahn

This year’s Oracle Open World was not the best of times; nor was it the worst of times. One of the world’s largest tech events was most notable for not being notable. No significant innovations or changes in direction were announced, Oracle executives stayed on message, competitors were not put down and longtime rival Microsoft gave the best keynote address of the event. In sporting terms it was a building year for Oracle. The big news turned out to be what was not being said.

Although a lot of lip service was paid to innovation, most of the true innovation was happening on the waves. The new products announced - Oracle Database In-Memory Option, the SPARC M6-32 server, and the SuperCluster M6-32 – do the same thing as older products only faster, better, cheaper. There was so much talk of appliances, it sometimes seemed like we were attending Williams Sonoma World. The other major product announcements: Compute Cloud, Object Storage Cloud, Database Cloud, Java Cloud, Business Intelligence Cloud, Documents Cloud, Mobile Cloud, Database Backup Cloud, Billing and Revenue Management Cloud, and Cloud Marketplace seemed to all have something to do with the cloud. In my estimation the connection between the two was not made very clear to the 60,000 attendees and perhaps for good reason.

Although the 34th America’s Cup Race was supposed to be the backdrop for Oracle Open World, the lack of major announcements and the keynotes speeches made Open World the backdrop for the race. Almost single handedly Larry Ellison has changed the elite, clubby, offshore yacht event into an extreme, mass media, in-your-face sport. Following rules which allow the winner of the last race to draw up the specifications for the boats in the current race, Team Oracle choose the superfast, super dangerous , super expensive, AC72, a wing-sailed catamaran for the competition – the world’s fastest sail boat.

The record time for an AC72 during the race was 55 mph (88 km/h, 47.57 knots); fast enough to get you a traffic ticket on most San Francisco streets. Sailors had to wear helmets, flak jackets, and underwater breathing devices while on board. Even so Artemis Racing crewmember Andrew “Bart” Simpson was killed during a training sail in May and the threat of a tragic mistake hung over every boat. With the cost of racing in AC72’s approaching $100 million, Club Nautico di Roma, the challenger of record, had to withdraw for financial reasons and only three teams could raise enough bank to race. Given the high level of sponsorship the race could no longer be held far off shore had been but in the busy cross roads of the San Francisco Bay.

Team Oracle started the best of 9 series with a two race deficit for trying to win a qualifying race the old fashion way - by cheating. Technology triumphed in the end. Using Oracle Big Data products to analyze the early races, Team Oracle modified its AC72 to make it the faster boat. In a made for television ending, Team Oracle came from behind to take the race from Team Emirates New Zealand (both entities long time Oracle customers). Following Roman fashion the keynote was interrupted to parade the Auld Mug, the oldest trophy in sports, around the Moscone Center in triumph.

At various points during the week the race had been so close that by my count Larry Ellison did not show up for at least three speeches he was scheduled to give including a keynote address to the 60,000 attendees. Given the boring nature of the announcements can you really blame him? Still there is some irony in a company saying you need to delight customers having a CEO who does not show up for meetings. Open World attendees repaid the snub by walking out in mass from pinch hitter Thomas Kurian’s speech but at the end of the day they will still buy the products. Given that Larry was the highest paid CEO in America last year his poor work attendance is likely to become an issue at this October’s shareholder’s meeting as the Wall Street Journal reports.

For this observer the best Oracle keynote was made by Edward Screven, the company’s chief corporate architect and Henrik Stahl, the vice president of Java Product Management. They presented a vision of the internet of things a world driven by smart, ubiquitous, connected devices: M2M—machine to machine and reported the number of developers working in Java is the same as the number of people in Sweden. The claim was also made that soon the number of devices will approach 8 billion. So during this speech received the unfortunate news that my toaster will soon be competing with my teenage daughter for internet access. Throw in my car, my refrigerator, and my washing machine and streaming old episodes of the original Star Trek or Emergency from Netflix will become even more painful than watching them.

The first Microsoft executive ever to address an Open World audience ever, Brad Anderson made the best keynote speeches of the entire event. Crisp, polished, practiced Anderson explained why Microsoft Azure was the best Cloud to run Oracle products. He was quickly followed by an Oracle speaker who explained why Azure was not the best cloud to run Oracle.

Unfortunately for Brad, at the end of the day, the Oracle spokesman will be proven right. The big news at Oracle Open World was what was unsaid. Oracle is crushing the stack and technology convergence is taking place in the cloud as well as in the hand held market. What this means is that Oracle is developing hardware optimize to run its software – a point made repeatedly during the event. Left unsaid at Oracle Open World 2013 was that someday Oracle hardware products and cloud products will converge giving it a cost advantage over all of its competitors running Oracle products including internal IT departments. In the long run Oracle Corporation, just like Team Oracle, has developed a strategy that cannot lose.

Disruptive Technology Companies: Taptera

Constellation Research

J. Bruce Daley is a former vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, Inc.  , Title: Big Ideas Age Before Beauty Before there can be a wholesale conversion to the Cloud legacy applications must be converted. This will take decades and not every vendor has taken this obstacle into account when projecting growth. Professional Services Firms Need a Recurring Revenue Model The services business has a lot of advantages but one big disadvantage in that you are always going out of business. Some organizations are using the Cloud to offer clients new ways to spend money than just time-and-materials or fixed price projects. ...

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San Francisco start up Taptera seeks to disrupt the world of SFA through mobile apps.The company is a spin off of Genentech where founders Chris O’Connor  was a Director of Cloud and Mobile Solutions and Dan McCall was a program manager.  While at Genetech the two developed 30 mobile productivity apps for internal Genetech use. In 2011 O’Connor and McCall left the company to start Taptera. Since then the start up has raised a little less than $3.5 million from enterprise software insiders lead by Terence Garnett  and M.R. Rangaswami.

Curently Taptera has seven products on the Apple App Store including

• Collateral

• Events

• Rooms

• Sophia

• Colleagues

• Marquee

• Showcase

Headquartered in San Francisco, the company is privately held but expanding. The company posts jobs on its blog.

ADP innovates with verve and good timing

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers.  Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization & Innovation  Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...

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One week before the yearly HR Technology Conference starts in Las Vegas, ADP decided to hold it first ever Innovation Showcase, featuring key product innovations in a live, interactive webcast. The timing was impeccable - not to far and not to close to the HR Technology Conference casting its shadow next week - and garner the appropriate attention. For instance enough time to get a blog post in - wait a minute...  but when a vendor has 620 thousand clients across 125 countries - the industry and influencer community does pay attention. ADP raised that attention even more with claiming 300 thousand clients and users in the cloud. 

 

 

On the day of the event, ADP released 4 press releases on the same day, centering around the release of their recruitment product, which was the biggest news in my view, it equally showed progress for its mobile application, a document management system fittingly called ADP Document Cloud and ADP Analytics and finally the opening of an Innovation Lab in Silicon Alley in New York city.  

 

Recruitment

Which vendor is not building or re-inventing recruitment? Well ADP is, too - and the new application looks good and seems to be easy to use and make a recruiter more productive. Tony Marzulli hit all the right strings and cords to play the social recruitment game. As with any first new release of course - we will have to see first customer references and see what's next on the road map - and both was not shared (yet).

 

In general my concern on recruiting is for all vendors is that they are more or less re-building ATS for the cloud, added some social, sprinkled maybe with some talent pool and CRM here and there etc. Nob vendor seems to be re-thinking recruitment from the ground up - which is a missed opportunity for a generation of talent management system. But certainly ADP cannot be blamed for this - a few years ago no one would even have expected any talent management products coming from the company. And there are some suggestions on how to make talent management more interesting in combination with talent management, as I blogged here before. 

 

ScreenShot from ADP Innovation Day Webinar

 

ADP also provided the necessary mobile capabilities for the mobile recruiting side - demoing a nice candidate application, including step wise increasing self presentation to the ultimate recruiter. 

 

And it's a nice capability that ADP can use its research arm to create interesting surveys, that can yield even more interesting results - like that companies with  more than 1000 employees plan to increase hiring by 34% in 2014. And that 18% of the US workforce may retire in the next 5 years, creating a massive opportunity for recruitment.

 

Mobile

Not surprisingly ADP did ship mobile paycheck and related information to a mobile  device first. But it has extended the scope way beyond this in the latest release - and it's a fine mobile application. Smart to allow the download of the full version with a demo mode - a good move to get an application go viral and massively adopted.  

 

ScreenShot from ADP Innovation Day Webinar

 

And ADP has now brought a similar clean UI to the table, smartly leveraging large screen estate while re-using code constructs (three mobile screens next to each other form the tablet screen factor) - a good example for re-using components. 

 

ADP Document Cloud

It was good to also see some of the less prominent and talked about functions being featured, too - with ADP Document Cloud, that you could call an embedded box-like lightweight document management system on the user side - but with the necessary controls to keep confidentiality and fiduciary obligations for users on the back end. 

 

ScreenShot from ADP Innovation Day Webinar

Personally I thought ADP was at its best pitching this product - it seems to be very near and dear to the traditional position of the company, for obvious reasons. But ADP delivered a clean and well integrated product that is easy to use. And on the benefit site ADP equally hit the benefits side well, e.g. that ADP Document Cloud can be part of a desaster recovery and redundancy strategy.

 

ADP Analytics

Well ADP is not the first vendor to step into the analytics marketing trap, calling reports and dashboards analytics, that are not real analytics (as discussed here). But the product provides the basic reporting and charting tools needed. The visual capabilities are pedestrian and surely need and can be improved. 

 

 

It was good to see that the product has some alert and sharing capability, which are the next step to make reporting / dashboarding more actionable.

Little nugget...

MyPOV

Event Report: Dell's Annual Analyst Conference INDIA #DAACIndia 2013

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation…...

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This post comes from Sachin Gosavi, our Vice President for South Asia

A First Peek Into Dell’s Private Affair

Constellation Research attended the DAACIndia 2013 on 26 and 27 Sept 2013 in Bangalore. Having won the go-private mandate barely a fortnight ago, ‘The World’s Largest Start-up’ message  dominated the conference theme.  Alok Ohrie, President and Managing Director, Dell India, dedicated a sizable chunk of his keynote to sharing Dell’s focus and priorities post mandate (see Figure 1).  Moreover, Dell's India customers speaking on the panel expressed a sense of relief that the uncertainty had passed.

Figure 1. Dell Unveils It's World's Largest Startup Messaging to India

Source: Dell India

Dell’s Future Is “Transform, Connect, Inform, Protect”
Dell continues to weave together it’s global theme of “Transform-Connect-Inform-Protect” for its customers in India, and is making investments in areas such as delivering new services/solutions, footprint expansion and widening the sales coverage beyond tier-II cities, superior customer experience, and support. Clients in India will closely watch execution of these investments and strategy, as Dell India witnessed a leadership change earlier this year. The Dell India leadership and many of it’s BU leaders attempted a two-front pitch:

1. Dell’s current India business and its roadmap, and
2. Dell’s global play as an end-to-end player

Constellation’s Point Of View (India): In a market like India, strong relationships and footprint spanning major industrial/IT hubs play an important role in the enterprise tech space.  Dell has been a key player in the Indian enterprise market, especially in the server and storage space, and Constellation expects them to build further on that position.  Beyond the hardware play, Constellation sees Dell’s Services unit gaining traction with a segment of Indian buyers – both existing and net new – with its Business Applications and BPO services. That said, in  Services, Dell needs to focus more on it’s Business Innovation Services portfolio addressing disruptive technology trends such as Cloud, Mobility, Social, BigData-Analytics and UC.  For, as with every market, there exists a Market-leader and Fast-follower section of Indian CXOs that are willing to bet on these emerging technologies and newer engagement models.  Dell can benefit by finding organizations looking for innovation partners in their quest.

Constellation’s Point Of View (Global): DAACIndia was a reflection of Dell’s global plans to shape up into an ‘End-to-end’ technology player. The economic recession has forced business model shifts at the major technology companies, and Dell is no exception.  Be it hardware vendors, service providers, and software players,  all are vying for the largest share of the business and IT technology budget today. It was this market reality that prompted Dell to explore ways to reinvent itself, which demands taking risks and faster decision making. The Go-private mandate will not only bring in freedom and speed in decision making, it will also help Dell re-deploy the resources, the management bandwidth and focus needed to re-shape its business model.

The Bottom Line: Dell’s Privatization Efforts Open Up Opportunities For Buyers
Dell provided many proof points to validate its vision. More importantly, the Indian market can take advantage of the integrated approach Dell is providing across the stack.  Consequently, Constellation’s preliminary assessment includes the following advice to prospects and existing customers:

1. Seek clarity on product road maps. As Dell enters privatization, Constellation expects Dell to re-organise a few of its businesses globally in the near term.  Buyers should seek clarity on key product road maps and investment priorities from Dell so they can adjust spending portfolios as needed.
2. Explore how “Transform, Connect, Inform, and Protect” can apply to existing budgets. Determine what role Dell plays in the overall technology strategy.  With an end-to-end play in mind, Dell is aggressively pushing for cross-sell opportunities in existing accounts with new products and services. Clients exploring these new products and services of Dell must ask for vertical/domain specific use cases, rather than relying on mere features/benefits.
3. Remain cautious. While market leaders and fast followers will most likely jump in to co-innovate with Dell, most customers and prospects will take a wait and see approach.  Why? Dell is at the beginning of its journey towards privatization.  Buyers should start with bite-sized entry points and work on expansion as Dell proves out its strategy and capabilities.

Your POV.

What’s your plan to invest with Dell?  Will Dell succeed as a private company in shoring up it's offerings? Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

Reprints

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Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, stay tuned for the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

* Not responsible for any factual errors or omissions.  However, happy to correct any errors upon email receipt.

Copyright © 2001 – 2013 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.
Contact the Sales team to purchase this report on a a la carte basis or join the Constellation Customer Experience!

Exit Sandman – microcosm of supply chain failures in the Bronx

pending

Guy Courtin was formerly Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research covering Matrix Commerce and how the Internet of Things drives the evolution of commerce.  Guy has over 15 years experience in the technology space and specifically in the supply chain space. Most recently he was the Vice President of Research at SCM World. Where he focused on the service providers that empowered supply chains. Prior to SCM World, Guy held numerous senior positions. He was responsible for product marketing at RSi, a retail supply chain solution provider. There managed RSi’s go to market strategy around their leading cloud based supply chain solutions. He also spear headed Progress Software’s supply chain group. Where he was responsible for driving revenue and market share as well…...

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Those of you who are baseball fans know that the greatest closer in baseball – Mariano Rivera – retired from the game this season (mind you I am a diehard Red Sox fan so that was hard for me to write). Rivera was a model of consistency in excellence – since 1995 the pitcher known as the Sandman accumulated some gaudy statistics:

• 652 saves
•  2.21 ERA
• 82 wins
• 1173 strikeouts
• 1.00 WHIP
• Oh and 5 World Series rings

His post season statistics are at an even greater plateau of excellence:  0.70 ERA, 8 wins and 42 saves…and those 5 World Series titles. To honour his retirement the Yankees decided to give away bobble heads during one of his last home games. Unfortunately the management of the supply chain was

The holy grail for Yankee fans

opposite of how Mariano pitched. It was an unmitigated disaster.

Supposedly there was a break down in the logistics; the truck delivering the inventory broke down on the New Jersey turnpike. Fans arriving at Yankee stadium were met with no available bobble heads, were given vouchers and asked to come back later during the game to collect their tchotchkes. Of course this being the Bronx, there were fights amongst the fans, long lines and people missing the game as they waited for their bobble head. All this caused by a simple truck breaking down on the highway…not an uncommon disruption in supply chain.

So what lessons can we learn from this?

·         Do better planning! The night of the give-away was known for months if not a year, everyone know that Mariano was retiring this season. The Yankees had plenty of time to plan the manufacturing and delivery of the items. But clearly their plan did not leave much buffer for any potential pitfalls – like a broken down truck.

·         Weigh the costs of not being able to have inventory on time with the cost of warehousing the inventory. Would it really have been that difficult for the Yankee to have the shipments arrive a week early? Would their “warehousing” costs have been that great? I highly doubt it. Maybe they were afraid that the stock would suffer from shrinkage prior to the give-away.

·         Have a plan in place to respond to potential supply chain outages. Trucks break down, factory manufacturing suffers unforeseen down time, points of entry suffer from labour strikes, and natural disasters cause interruptions. The Yankees had a plan, but it did not seem very well thought out – forcing the paying audience to leave their seats to wait in line for something they should have received upon entering the ball park not a good plan. Why not let people get their bobble head dolls on the way out of the park? Plus that would have guaranteed everyone stayed until the end of the game!

What is fascinating about what happened with the Yankees is that it was a microcosm of problems that can strike your supply chains. The problems with inventory management, transportation, and the desire for just in time all blew up under the weight of one truck, broken down on the Jersey turnpike.

Unlike Mariano, the Yankees did not demonstrate superior execution when it came to the bobble head give away. The Yankee closer was relentless in his ability to come into a game with a plan – throw that cutter and get people out. His ability to execute to that plan led to his gaudy statistics.

Unfortunately the Yankees supply chain for bobble head dolls looked more like Byung-Hyun Kim from the 2001 World Series – all over the place, not executing properly and leading to a minor disaster.

Constellation Research Appoints Steve Wilson as VP and Principal Analyst Covering Digital Identity

Appointment expands Constellation’s coverage area into the data privacy and digital identity space

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA  – Constellation Research, Inc., the award-winning research and advisory firm focused on how disruptive technologies transform business models announced today the addition of digital privacy specialist, Steve Wilson, to the research team as VP and Principal Analyst. Wilson, whose research focuses on digital identity, privacy and cyber security, expands Constellation’s ability to provide online risk management research/solutions to its early adopter clients worldwide. 

The addition of Wilson and consequential expansion into the digital identity space signals Constellation’s commitment to push its coverage area to the frontier of disruptive technology, and provide its early adopter clients with the most comprehensive coverage of emerging and disruptive technologies.

Wilson, a leading authority on digital identity, authentication technology, online risk management and privacy has been a thought leader in emerging authentication frameworks around the Asia Pacific since 1998. He lays claim to several authentication inventions. Wilson’s research focuses on identity federation, identity innovation, privacy management, and authentication technology optimization.

On joining Constellation Research
“We are witnessing tremendous flux as the digital revolution blends our work and personal spaces. As a society we are only beginning to understand the impact on private and public identities and how we conduct ourselves in the digital economy. Constellation Research is a red hot melting pot of business and technology, and an amazing channel in which to join disruptive ideas to diverse businesses.” - Steve Wilson, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

Steve Wilson’s Research Manifesto
“I work in disruptive authentication technologies and I’m committed to reforming identity management orthodoxies. Novel technology driven IDM ‘ecosystem’ provokes a sort of immune response from the business establishment; despite the desperate problems of trust and insecurity online.  Promising IDM frameworks repeatedly fail. My work tries to explain this paradox.  The answers lie in re-imagining identity management, with a promise of more elegant identity solutions that fit more smoothly into the ways real business is done.” - Steve Wilson, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang comments on the significance of Digital Identity
"The recent NSA leaks, a battle for identity among social logins and financial services firms, and a growing awareness for a balance between privacy and convenience have our clients asking for Steve's expertise", noted R "Ray" Wang, Founder and Chairman of Constellation Research, "We're very lucky to have Steve on the team as his research agenda is core across our business themes.  For those who are attending our innovation summit, you can catch him live as he leads one of our tracks in our Big Ideas Forum on October 31, 2013" - R "Ray" Wang, Chairman and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

COORDINATES

Twitter: @Steve_Lockstep
Profile: https://www.constellationr.com/users/swilson
Linkedin:  http://www.linkedin.com/in/lockstep
Geo: Sydney, Australia

Steve Wilson Biographical Information

Steve is a leading authority on digital identity, authentication, PKI, smart technologies and privacy.  As an independent analyst and strategic adviser for 18 years, Stephen has helped clients throughout the Asia Pacific navigate the multi-facetted identity management landscape.  He bridges and brings together expertise in technology, business and governance, with sophisticated but practical consulting. 

Steve has been a key player in numerous emerging authentication, PKI and smartcard frameworks.  Over 1998-2001 he served as a Ministerial appointee to Australia’s National Electronic Authentication Council (NEAC).  In 2006 he created the first National Smartcard Framework.  He led the reform of the Gatekeeper PKI framework, and was responsible for innovations including Relationship Certificates and Known Customer registration which are now central to contemporary Australian PKI.  Since 1998 Steve has provided strategic IDM framework advice to the governments of New Zealand, the US, Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Macau, Malaysia and Kazakhstan.  He was a long term member of the APEC eAuthentication Task Group, and of the American Bar Association PKI Working Group.

From 1995 to 2004,Steve held Principal Consultant and R&D leadership roles with PwC, KPMG, Securenet Ltd and Security Domain (later Baltimore Technologies).  Before that, he worked for nine years in government R&D and the biomedical industry in Australia and the USA.  in 2004 he founded the independent Lockstep Consulting and Lockstep Technologies. 

He holds an honors degree in Electrical Engineering, and a Bachelor of Science. 

Steve Wilson Research Agenda

Research will focus on:

• The Consumerization of Identity
• The Business of Social Logon
• Big Data and the Collection Limitation Principle
• The future of privacy in blended personal and work spaces
• Is privacy really "good for business"?
• Internet Life Verification
• The ecology of identity

Press Contacts:

Contact the Media and Influencers relations team at [email protected] for interviews with analysts.

Sales Contacts:

Contact our sales team at [email protected].

Is it all coming together for Oracle in 2014? Or not?

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers.  Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization & Innovation  Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...

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Oracle Openworld just finished in San Francisco - and it was the event it promised to be - not big, but mega - in all aspects - size, attendees, number of sessions, steps walked between meetings (I even walked myself some blisters...), number of press releases etc. But let's look at the good and the bad.
 

Oracle's vision has been formulated and commented on many times - it is to create an integrated stack from low level storage services - even tape - all the way up to complex advanced analytical applications. In between the company already offers everything an enterprise may desire for any automation need.

It is Oracle's believe that by designing and building all these software layers in combination with its own hardware - it will be able to achieve better price performance than any of the (less well integrated) competitors. And this is very well compatible with the core corporate DNA of Oracle - of reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) through its products and services.
 

Top 3 Positive Signs

The unveiling of Oracle's in  memory plans is a key stepping stone to get Oracle's strategy going. And it's less the features and capabilities of in memory - that by itself are nice and compelling - but the nature of the delivery - that is non invasive, I called it organic in my first take here. For Oracle's vision to materialize both on the drawing boards of its engineers, its production code and the customer adoption - it matters greatly, that the upgrade to the latest version of key products like the database are not invasive, do not require additional coding beyond the task of upgrading. This will accelerate adoption.

The next one is, that Oracle seems to have understood that it needs to maintain its technology provider role - even in the cloud age. And while that self understanding peeked through e.g. with the Microsoft and Salesforce.com partnership agreements and announcements from June of this year - it was visible also in the keynotes of Thomas Kurian and Larry Ellison (the one that Kurian held for him). If Oracle manages to get a relevant piece of the license revenue from the cloud infrastructure providers trough any of the dozen or so XX as a service products - it will be positioned well for the future where it can play in the public cloud, it's own public cloud and on premise.

Finally we also had the chance to speak to a number of Fusion HCM Cloud customers - either implementing or being live running on Fusion. The sheer number, their experience and commitment were  more positive than what we had expected based on the previously general available information and sentiment in the marketplace. It's important for Oracle to see traction of its top of the stack products, the Fusion applications, especially in an embattled marketplace like HCM.
 

Top 3 remaining concerns

We have blogged before on how the BigData trend has the potential to disrupt Oracle. If the growing number of BigData players manage to move close enough to real time and support of transactional processes, they form a threat to Oracle's core and bread and butter - the database. And while Oracle has made a lot of progress with its BigData appliance - the BigData threat is potentially less of a technological threat but a commercial threat, being mostly open source based.

Which leads us to the second concern, centered around open source. Oracle is setup to extract significant amounts of payments from its customers. Needless to state the company provides value to its customers, but Oracle has mastered the art of price differentiation - never (or seldom) charging too match to stymie the uptake of new technology but equally avoiding any association with being a cheap offering. And while that is a fair strategy and probably the core to it fueling a massive R&D budget - it  makes Oracle vulnerable to low cost or even free open source competitors.

And lastly - Oracle is building a massive technology stack - probably the most extensive one ever build. We know IBM did the same, but we dare to say in a less complex and dynamic age. The sheer magnitude of engineers involved, interfaces, testing, documentation, training etc could make an endeavor like Fusion fail. Providing non disruptive path to get to Fusion is a key aspect - but that's not always possible for technical reasons or for decisions taken in the past. Ironically the sheer magnitude of the effort both labor wise and financially, is also a barrier to entry for most competitors and specifically for open source based products and their communities, that simply do not have the resources.
 

MyPOV

It is difficult to distill an event like OpenWorld into a short blog post (but writing double the amunt would not have made it easier). Clearly Oracle is on a roll and at this point the positive signs prevail over the warning signs... but given the complex and dynamic environment Oracle competes in - that can change any day.

In the  next quarters the company will have to sort out its hardware business and create customer success around its Fusion Applications. Nothing validates a technology stack  more than the products sitting on the very top of it.
 

News from one of the oldest software companies - and it's getting exciting

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers.  Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization & Innovation  Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...

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One of the oldest software companies in Europe - if not in the word - purely founded for the purpose of software as a business, is Software AG in Germany. Unlike some older companies, Software AG never dabbled into anything hardware - but only focused on software for its 40+ years in existence.

Software AG was founded in Darmstadt, Germany by 6 members of a local consulting firm, not even 30 miles north of the more prominent other German software company's location, Walldorf (SAP (AG)). But it was too early for business software, so the Software AG founders focused on building the tools that were needed at the time, zeroing in on a database, that was supposed to be adaptable, so in 1971 the company launched adabas (you guess it - adaptable database system). It prove to be quite successful in the banking and insurance areas and along came the need to establish a programming language, that the founders wanted to make more easy to use and learn than the other programming languages on the market. In 1979 the company delivered natural as a 4GL application development environment - an easy to learn programming language that supported both procedural and event driving programming. 

In the 90ies the company extended it product range and most notably had partnerships with SAP (yes - a cheaper database option was even then a topic of interest) and Microsoft (porting of DCOM to other platforms than Windows). 

Later the company established a fondness of all things XML, which despite very high marks on the usability and lowered cost of ownership aspects of its products, never really took off and put the company in the doldrums to a certain extent.

Reshaping Strategy

In 2007 Software AG acquired webmethods - and with that focusing more on the integration aspects of software than it's creation, which in hindsight - and the 2013 perspective - provided to be pretty pivotal. Equally the acquisition of IDS Scheer AG with its Aris modelling tool was a key addition to is products and services portfolio. When Software AG was looking at a way to accelerate slow running business processes it acquired Terracotta - a leader of in memory caching technology. All that formed a very good base for growth at Software AG.

The latest 

While the company still provides adabas and natural, the main focus has been on integration and creation of high value, real-time and highly complex processes. Software AG picked more acquisitions in 2013 to complement this strategy, acquiring the CEP platform Apama from Progress, realizing the need for better visualization acquiring Jackbe and improving the agility of integration to webmethods with Longjump. And finally there is ambition to play in the IT transformation market with the acquisition of alphabet AG. It will be interesting what the company will unveil at their upcoming user conference in early October in San Francisco.

MyPOV

It's remarkable to have a 40+ year run in the software industry. Inevitably there will be success and failure, but with the right degree of innovation and re-inventing itself, Software AG has become one of the key players in the upcoming cloud integration game.

But the game has not changed - and we do not see it changing with the cloud - that integration vendors have to create value and not simply be a point to point connection protocol. Here the cloud is an opportunity for all of them -  not just Software AG - to more easily create value added services on top of the pure integration data streams. 

Is it Personal Information or not ? Embrace the uncertainty.

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Steve Wilson is former VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, leading the business theme Digital Safety and Privacy. His coverage includes digital identity, data protection, data privacy, cryptography, and trust. His advisory services to CIOs, CISOs, CPOs and IT architects include identity product strategy, security practice benchmarking, Privacy by Design (PbD), privacy engineering and Privacy [or Data Protection] Impact Assessments (PIA, DPIA). Coverage Areas: -  Identity management, frameworks & governance-  Digital identity technologies-  Privacy by Design -  Big Data; “Big Privacy”-  Identity & privacy innovation Previous experience: Wilson has worked in ICT innovation, research, development and analysis for over 25 years. With double…...

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The US General Services Administration defines Personally Identifiable Information as information that can be used to distinguish or trace an individual’s identity, either alone or when combined with other personal or identifying information that is linked or linkable to a specific individual (underline added). This means that items of data can constitute PII if other data can be combined to identify the person concerned. The fragments are regarded as PII even if it is the whole that does the identifying. And the definition means that a piece of data may be classed as PII before it is identified, rather than after.  This is only prudent. 

I am frequently asked - semi-rhetorically - by IT and security professionals if the definition means that even an IP or MAC address nowadays could count as PII? And I've said that in short, yes, it appears so!

Some security people are uncomfortable with this, but why? When it comes down to it, what is so worrying about having to take care of Personal Information? In Australia and in 100-odd other jurisdictions with OECD based data protection laws, it means that data custodians are required to handle their information assets in accordance with certain sets of Privacy Principles. This is not trivial but neither is it necessarily onerous. If the obligations in the Privacy Principles are examined in a timely manner, alongside compliance, security and information management, then they can be accommodated as just another facet of organisational hygiene.

So for instance, consider a large data base of 'anonymous' records indexed by MAC address. This is just the sort of data that's being collected by retailers with in-store cell phone tracking systems, and used to study how customers move through the facility and interact with stores and merchandise. Strictly speaking, if the records are not identifiable then they are not PII and data protection laws do not apply. But the new definition of Personal Information in Australia means IT designers need to consider the prospect of the records becoming identifiable in the event that another data set comes into play. And why not? If anonymous data becomes identified then the data custodian will suddenly find themselves in scope for privacy laws, so it's prudent to plan for that scenario now. Depending on the custodian's risk appetite, any large potentially identifiable data set should be managed with regard to Privacy Principles. These would dictate that the collection of records should be limited to what's required for clear business purposes; that records collected for one purpose not be casually used for other unrelated purposes; and that the organisation be open about what data it collects and why. These sorts of measures are really pretty sensible.

Security practitioners I've spoken with about PII and identifiability are also upset about the ambiguity in the definition of Personally Identifiable Information. They complain that the identifiability of a piece of data is relative and fluid, and they don't want to have to interpret the legal definition. But I'm struck here by an inconsistency, because security management is all about uncertainty.

Yes, identifiability changes over time and in response to organisational developments. But security professionals and ICT architects should treat the future identification of a piece of unnamed data as just another sort of threat. The probability that data becomes identifiable depends on a range of variables that are a lot like other factors (like the emergence of other data, changes of circumstance, or developments in data analysis) that are routinely evaluated during risk assessment.

To deal with identifiability and the classification of data as PII or not, you should look at the following:

• consider the broad context of your data assets, how they are used, and how they are linked to other data sets
• think about how your data assets might grow and evolve over time
• look at business pressures and plans to expand the detail and value of data, and the resulting potential for new linkages
• make assumptions, and document them, as you do with any business analysis, and
• plan to review periodically.

Many organisations maintain a formal Information Assets Inventory and/or an Information Classification regime, and these happen to be ideal management mechanisms in which to classify data as PII or not PII. That decision should be made against the backdrop of the organisation's risk appetite. How conservative or adventurous are in you respect of other risks? If you happen to mis-classify Personal Information, what could be the consequences, and how would the organisation respond? Do some scenario planning, and involve legal, risk and compliance. While you're at it, take the chance to raise awareness outside IT of how information is managed. Be prepared to review and change your classifications from non-PII to PII over time. Remember that security managers should always be prepared for change. Embrace the uncertainty in Personal Information!

Truly, privacy can be tackled by IT professionals in much the same way as security. There are no certainties in security and it's the same in privacy. We will never have perfect privacy; rather, privacy management is really about putting reasonable arrangements in place for controlling the flow of Personal Information.

So, if something that's anonymous today, might be identified later, you're going have to deal with that eventually. Why not start the planning now, treat identifiability as just another threat, and roll your privacy and security management together?

See also the excellent survey of identifiability by William B. Baker and Anthony Matyjaszewski The changing meaning of 'personal data' (2010). The essay looks specifically at the question of whether IP addresses can be PII, and highlights a trend in the US towards conceding that IP addresses combined with other data can identify, and may therefore count as PII:

Privacy regulators in the European Union regard dynamic IP addresses as personal information. Even though dynamic IP addresses change over time, and cannot be directly used to identify an individual, the EU Article 29 Working Party believes that a copyright holder using "reasonable means" can obtain a user's identity from an IP address when pursuing abusers of intellectual property rights. More recently, other European privacy regulators have voiced similar views regarding permanent IP addresses, noting that they can be used to track and, eventually, identify individuals.
This contrasts sharply to the approach taken in the United States under laws such as COPPA where, a decade ago, the FTC considered whether to classify even static IP addresses as personal information but ultimately rejected the idea out of concern that it would unnecessarily increase the scope of the law. In the past few years, however, the FTC has begun to suggest that IP addresses should be considered PII for much the same reasons as their European counterparts. Indeed, in a recent consent decree, the FTC included within the definition of "nonpublic, individually-identifiable information" an “IP address (or other "persistent identifier")." And the HIPAA Privacy Rule treats IP addresses as a form of "protected health information" by listing them as a type of data that must be removed from PHI for deidentification purposes.

Richard Napier Creates Siebel 20 Year Anniversary Quiz

Constellation Research

J. Bruce Daley is a former vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, Inc.  , Title: Big Ideas Age Before Beauty Before there can be a wholesale conversion to the Cloud legacy applications must be converted. This will take decades and not every vendor has taken this obstacle into account when projecting growth. Professional Services Firms Need a Recurring Revenue Model The services business has a lot of advantages but one big disadvantage in that you are always going out of business. Some organizations are using the Cloud to offer clients new ways to spend money than just time-and-materials or fixed price projects. ...

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Leading Siebel blogger Richard Napier has created a quiz to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the product. His On Demand Education blog is one of the most popular dedicated to Oracle Siebel technology.

The free quiz has some technical questions, some functional questions, and some Siebel trivia. The quiz is free, and even has a leaderboard to capture and share results through Twitter, Facebook and other social networks.

Richard challenges his readers to "see who is the Siebel Quiz Master". The quiz can be found here at http://ondemand-education.com/corp/index.php/quizzes/siebel-20-year-anniversary-quiz/