The annual Oracle OpenWorld user group meeting provides an opportunity to step back and take a longer view of business, industry and technology trends affecting the company. Last year, after listening to Larry Ellison’s and Mark Hurd’s vision for the future of IT, I wrote that Oracle had to continue shifting its focus to business applications because the accelerating shift to cloud computing would lead corporations to outsource their IT infrastructures, services and security to third parties. Eventually, this would substantially shrink the market for corporate IT departments, which has been Oracle’s strength. At this year’s conference the company demonstrated how it is applying its technology strengths to create a competitive advantage that it can apply to its broad business applications portfolio.
Oracle Adapts Business Applications Intelligently in the Cloud
Topics: Big Data, Performance Management, SaaS, ERP, Office of Finance, Analytics, Cloud Computing, PaaS, Digital Technology
Oracle’s Larry Ellison Challenges Human Capital Management Market
This year Oracle OpenWorld conference opened with a fiery speech by Larry Ellison, who has stepped down from his role as CEO to become Executive Chairman and CTO. Filling his rhetoric with claims of market leadership and attacks on competitors SAP and Workday, Ellison set an aggressive tone for those who followed him. In a talk relevant to my research practice, Chris Leone, senior vice president of applications development, asserted that Oracle is making progress in human capital management (HCM) as it enters the fourth year of offering the Human Capital Management Cloud. Leone asserted that Oracle now has 13,500 overall HCM customers, roughly half those being global customers, which is significant as Oracle touts its global capabilities as a differentiator. He provided statistics on growth of the cloud products; one was that over the past year Oracle has gained over 1,000 new talent management customers for its Cloud HCM business.
Topics: Mobile, Social Media, HCM, Human Capital Analytics, Human Capital Management, Core HR, Employee Engagement, Platform as a service, TM, Wellness, Analytics, Business Collaboration, Cloud Computing, Collaboration, Mobility, Oracle, HRMS, Talent Management, Social, PaaS
What Every CEO Needs to Know About Key Supporting Technologies
I recently started a series of blog posts on what CEOs (and for that matter, all senior corporate executives) need to know about IT. The first covered the high-level issues. As I noted there, it’s not necessary for a CEO of a company to be able to write Java code or master the intricacies of an ERP or sales compensation application. However, CEOs must grasp the basics of IT just as they must understand basic corporate finance, the production process and – at least at a high level – the technologies that support that process. This installment is about four supporting technologies that will be drive considerable change in business computing over the next five years. Each of these subjects is worthy of a chapter-length discussion or even a book; what follows is the “elevator pitch” version.
Topics: Big Data, Mobile, SaaS, Sales Performance, Social Media, Supply Chain Performance, Customer, ERP, Operational Performance, Business Analytics, Business Collaboration, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Complex Event Processing, Customer & Contact Center, Financial Performance, In-memory, Information Management, Workforce Performance, CFO, CEO, PaaS
