The Blog

  • September 29, 2010
  • Open World — You had to be there

    A lot went down at Oracle Open World and you are probably as tired of reading about it as I am of writing about it.  Some very good reporting and analysis has come out of it all and you can easily find it on line if you wish.  I was impressed with several things that Oracle did including making strides in sales and marketing software and in introducing two new lines of compute servers.

    First off, the company said it was beefing up its marketing software because too many customers were looking elsewhere for marketing solutions.  This is generally in line with its acquisition of Market2Lead in May.  Until now, marketing has remained a place where independent software developers could plant a flag and pretty much be left alone by the big guys.  They were too busy making sales and service suites.

    Then too, marketing has always been a suite in itself.  You don’t build marketing the way you build sales for instance.  There are many more moving parts in marketing for campaigns, for lead generation, for market intelligence and for social media inputs.  No doubt about it, marketing is a big deal and when a major vendor like Oracle says it’s putting its focus on it, it is remarkable.  Marketing also represents relative white space for Oracle, which makes it doubly interesting.

    It’s early days as far as I am concerned with Oracle’s marketing solution.  It’s even a challenge defining what is included.  For instance, Oracle’s very fine loyalty application — marketing or service or sales?  Ditto territory planning and white space analysis — sales or marketing?

    I know what you might be thinking: some of these are clearly not marketing.  But hold on, they aren’t marketing today, maybe, but what happens with the economy in the next couple of years will seriously change the CRM suite.  Consider one thing: suppose demand remains sluggish in the sense that we’re not in recession but neither are we in a robust recovery.

    Under these conditions many companies double down on their existing customers which changes the sales dynamic and necessarily the underpinnings for what software solutions need to do.  My reading of Oracle Open World is that the company is hedging its bets and building products that can prosper in the slow growth scenario.

    But the most interesting part of the show for me was observing the transition of Oracle from cloud skeptic to cloud believer.  As with any religious conversion, the newly believing are, shall we say, an acquired taste.  A year ago, CEO Larry Ellison questioned the need for the designation but this year he had cloud religion.  Of course religious beliefs span a spectrum and the Oracle version of cloud computing can best be described as Amazon EC2 Reformed.

    Simply put, Oracle’s approach is infrastructure as a service (IaaS).  Nothing wrong with that but it brings to mind something Ellison said a year ago, paraphrasing now, cloud computing isn’t new, it’s what we’ve always done.  Certainly IaaS is what we’ve been doing or what’s been done before.  It consists of selling compute time and storage made available on the Internet with a side order of your favorite licensed software.  Nothing wrong with that either except for Oracle’s other big announcement of Exalogic, a beast of a fault tolerant computer that Ellison referred to as a cloud in a box.  Rule One of selling is to sell what you’ve got and Ellison certainly did that is his conception of “Hardware. Software. Complete.”

    Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com and advocate of cloud computing as a transformative innovation that he calls Cloud 2, sold what he has too.  Benioff gave a keynote extolling the virtues of all things Cloud 2 including multi-tenancy and Chatter, a new category of collaborative tool that leverages crowd wisdom to enhance company performance.

    In the process, Ellison and Benioff each used their keynotes to one-up the other while advocating for their favorite definitions of cloud computing.  I have to say it was entertaining and a bit silly.  The publicity heat given off by the back and forth gave each company free coverage but did little to settle the argument.

    It is an argument that will rage for a long time because the market actually needs both forms of cloud computing.  For big companies with deep investments in software licenses, the Oracle cloud is a good way to lower the overhead incurred with running a data center.  Lower those costs and you’ve made computing more affordable and the details about how you achieved the results is almost immaterial — until you need something new.

    The Salesforce idea of cloud computing better fits the needs of any company looking to build net new solutions or to take advantage of new applications from other vendors and new application types.  A company is less likely to convert its Oracle general ledger to Salesforce but many are very open minded about moving to the Salesforce cloud for net new and new category applications like Chatter.  I didn’t hear any talk about the Oracle development platform because that’s Fusion and it won’t be generally available until next year.  When it becomes available things could change.

    I have seen Unix computers running converted mainframe applications complete with green screens and I see no reason why the Oracle cloud won’t look like that — i.e. a place for legacy applications — in the future.  It’s a huge market and for a long time I expect to see both forms of cloud computing to co-exist and flourish.  But eventually, the Oracle form of cloud computing will need to bend to the inevitable and begin to resemble Salesforce in the multi-tenant aspect.

    So my big take-away from Open World?  As always it’s an industry in transition and the number and kind of solutions are huge.  Oracle is doing some neat things at the application level and protecting its flank where needed.  All told, it was illuminating and fun.

    Published: 14 years ago


    Discussion

    • September 29th, 2010 at 12:30 pm    

      Hi, Denis —

      Thanks, as always, for your insightful coverage. I really wish I’d been able to attend this year—it looks like it was an eventful OOW—but at least we’ve got folks like you to help keep the rest of us grounded.

      While I wish the acceptance of cloud computing wasn’t a major news item at this point, anytime a company of Oracle’s size and influence shifts its philosophy it’s important. It should be enlightening to see how a cloud-comfy Oracle comes to market in the next several months, and how customers of all sizes react. The idea of combining legacy and current applications via Fusion (or any form of SOA) and making them available through the cloud makes my imagination tingle.

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