CEO Mark Hurd Is Firm on Oracle's CX Commitment at Modern Customer Experience Conference

LAS VEGAS, NV—Since 1990, more than 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies have either gone bankrupt, merged, or been acquired, Oracle CEO Mark Hurd said as he kicked off the Oracle Modern Customer Experience event here today. Since 2000, he continued, more than 50 percent of Fortune 500 companies have gone down the same road. The reason for this, according to Hurd, is that customer expectations have changed drastically and quickly. Many modern consumers, for example, are now willing to pay more for better service, and care more about experience than they do about price.

One of the biggest customer experience challenges plaguing companies and preventing them from delivering outstanding customer experiences continues to be siloed processes and solution ecosystems. Only 10 percent of organizations are integrating processes, Hurd said. As a result, Oracle's key priorities in recent months have been delivering cross-channel integration and agile solutions that leverage connections among data sources. "Companies that win are able to do multiple things at one time...this will be the difference between success or failure," he said.

During his keynote, Hurd emphasized Oracle's commitment to customer experience. "We bet with our wallet," he said, referring to the vendor's recent acquisitions of Eloqua, Responsys, and Bluekai, which have since been integrated into the Oracle Marketing Cloud.

Hurd also looked ahead, and discussed how Oracle is bracing for upcoming changes that will affect customer experience in the near future. Mobile and social have already disrupted many traditional customer experience processes, and the Internet of Things promises to have a disruptive effect as well. The Internet of Things is evolving, Hurd said in a media roundtable discussion, and Oracle is "gearing up for it.

"The reality is that there is a big transformation happening in front of us," Hurd said, adding that "there will be a couple of plays that Oracle will make," and a "big play will be on the thing itself." When it comes to the Internet of Things, Hurd said that the automotive industry will be an "interesting" one to watch. There are more than 100 million vehicles shipped in the world annually, and as cars become more connected, the "ability to sell services becomes your ability to make money," Hurd said. As car companies become software providers, Oracle will play a role: "Java makes sense to have on those things," he said.

But the vendor's involvement won't stop there—connected devices such as cars will drive a massive amount of data, and there will be a need for solutions that can separate the worthless from the worthwhile data. As the Internet of Things goes mainstream, "Oracle will automate the 'thing,' and be able to turn [the data it generates] into something meaningful," Hurd said.

To deliver on its promise of deeper integrations that ensure more seamless customer experiences, Oracle announced a number of product updates to the Oracle Marketing Cloud's data management platform. Updates include lookalike modeling functionality for cross-channel marketing automation customers as well as OnDemand On-Board, both of which enable marketers to combine data from Web analytics, 

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