October 1, 2014
By Maria Minsker, contributing writer

Oracle OpenWorld: As the Need for Business Digitalization Grows, Oracle Speeds Ahead with New Cloud Solutions

five key computing trends most companies are tackling today, which are globalization, the data explosion, mobility, transitioning to the cloud, and modernization. Oracle is innovating with technology that offers solutions for all five areas, he said, but he spoke first about the company's newest big data analytics tools.

"Our latest updates revolve [around] three main objectives: allowing you to store and analyze both structured and unstructured data together, give you a set of tools to visualize your data and find data patterns or problems, and giving you great speed through in-memory technology.

Offerings such as Oracle Big Data SQL, Hadoop, and Oracle Big Data Discovery were among the most buzzed-about new tools at the conference. During a product presentation, Chris Lynskey, vice president of product management at Oracle, demonstrated how the combination of tools can be used to generate a sophisticated set of retail point-of-sale analytics.

Oracle Big Data SQL allows users to keep data in SQL storage and in Hadoop to analyze it in both places simultaneously. "You've got the Oracle database and Hadoop running at the same time, and you only have to query once," he said. Oracle Big Data Discovery, the "visual face for Hadoop," complements the Big Data SQL functionality, and allows users to visualize data for prediction and correlation purposes.

Using the retail point-of-sale example, Lynskey illustrated how the tools allow users to determine not only who's shopping most frequently and most recently using data that's found in Hadoop, but also who's spending the most money, which is information that's available through traditional warehouse data. "I can pull data from both sources to run a combination analysis, to zero in on the customers I want, and then get the marketing folks to hit those customers with extra promotions," he said.

Oracle also unveiled a new mobile strategy at OpenWorld, and Rick Smith, the senior director of software development for the Oracle Cloud Applications Group, demonstrated the updated mobile development framework available through the Oracle Mobile Cloud service.

The Mobile Cloud will serve as an end-to-end infrastructure for building apps connected to Oracle's software portfolio, and will enable developers to write one code base for both iOS and Android applications. The development process will also be more streamlined with a single sign-on, and be equipped with added security. "App building will be much easier and more template-based, and will also allow developers to easily incorporate data from other locales, like the Oracle Sales Cloud," Smith said.

Rounding out a group of new cloud services, Oracle introduced its Social Network Cloud Service as well. The network will look like Facebook, but will facilitate more secure collaboration in a company-focused environment.

By the end of day two, Oracle's new stance on the cloud was clear. "We're excited about the software innovations we've delivered in the cloud. Over a period of just two years, we've gone from no one to 62 million people a day using our cloud services," Kurian said. The growth was driven by the fact that more people wanted to use Oracle software without having to run Oracle software, he explained, inviting users to try out the new solutions and promising that there are many more to come.