During my visit to the 2014 Oracle Openworld I had the opportunity to talk with some of Oracle's customers and with different vendors who are leaders in their industries.
This year there is a big focus on the cloud, which is not surprise. Companies are becoming more aggressive in adopting a hybrid between cloud and traditional information systems on premises. Oracle is trying to determine how to support 20 year old applications which are no longer supported by the original vendors, and how to avoid for those apps to age out placing customers on a bad spot in the future. A lot of companies are embracing the SaS schema, especially companies with global operations because that allows them standardization and also resolves the problem of keeping up with application upgrades.
The other emphasis is to provide real time data to the executives, including information from social media. The goal here is to enable executives to make decisions on the spot rather than weeks or months after obtaining the data when they finally get the results from their analytics. Companies believe that there is traditionally a big gap between the time they obtain the information and the time they react to it. By the time they shift gears in their business they missed some or all of the momentum. In order to achieve rapid response time, there are dedicated people constantly studying customer science and interpreting the volume and complexity of the data. This allows them to engage the customer digitally in real time before the analytics age out.
Many companies find they are experiencing the same types of problems. Some common trends are: reducing the number of legacy applications; moving into a single CRM and ERP systems; achieving globalization and standardization by leveraging Cloud-like technologies; and simplification and modularization of infrastructure technology to enable the use of common computing power.
There has been a shift where companies are not longer organizing and following sales leads by territory and region, but by customers that are most likely to buy, with the implementation of digital technology, it is not longer that relevant to have a presence on a specific territory or region, and companies can save in OPEX by making strategic use of their sales force.
On the technical side Oracle is promoting the consolidation trend by recommending to implement multi tenant databases, this is specially good and true for environments such as development and test sharing the same hardware, but maintaining their inter-independence. On the analytics side once we get to Oracle 12c there is a paid feature called in memory database which allows you non only to store tables in memory, but to organize them in a columnar fashion, which makes your analytics performance many times faster.
Talking to some of the vendors they tell me nobody is doing money with Big Data, companies simple do not have interest on it yet, but they see a lot of potential and started to see tangible sales on SaS and other Cloud like technologies, the big concern here is still security and the big challenge is extracting your data if you decide to no longer be on a hosted Cloud service.
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