Oracle Apps in Transformation: Big Numbers, News Coming at Open World

With Oracle’s huge Open World customer conference coming next week in San Francisco, a LinkedIn blog post last night from applications leader Steve Miranda offered some compelling glimpses into what business customers can expect.

I’ll get to the broader list in a moment. First, I wanted to look at with two revelations from Miranda that are both quite striking, but for very different reasons.

1. The incredible acceleration of innovation powered by the cloud.

“During this calendar year, we will update our Cloud Apps more times than all of the upgrades in the history of PeopleSoft, E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, and Siebel combined,” Miranda writes in his post.

2. Oracle’s ongoing efforts to transform its culture.

Under a subhead saying “Take note of the cultural shift,” Miranda writes, “Whether you attend Oracle OpenWorld or follow us from afar, we want to acknowledge the much-needed, fundamental change that’s going on at Oracle. We are a business that itself is in transformation. We’ll continue to build great products, while we consciously align ourselves with the markets, the world at large, and you, the people we serve. We know actions speak louder than words and we hope you notice.”

Evolution at Oracle

The first point highlights one of the cloud’s greatest attributes: the ability to relentlessly drive customer-centric innovation into modern applications to ensure users can keep up with the latest demands in our fast-changing and data-driven world. 

Miranda’s second point is equally profound. Because it represents an admission from Oracle that just as its technologies need to evolve rapidly, so too must its culture. And while Miranda doesn’t quite specify the from/to nature of that shift, I think we can infer that he’s saying that Oracle must continue to be more customer-focused if it expects to become even more successful in the cloud.

A CIO recently told me that “Oracle’s about as huggable as a porcupine.” So clearly Miranda is on to something! And that need to put the customer at the center of everything is precisely what’s happening within all of Oracle’s customers as they undergo digital transformation and rebuild their business processes, services, products, and revenue models.

So why should Oracle itself be immune from the global shift to a customer-centric view of the universe?

A few other highlights from Miranda’s piece:

• His Tuesday-morning keynote, in concert with CX leader Rob Tarkoff, will showcase four customers: IBVI, Ferrari, Hilton and Hearst.
• They’ll delve into the rapidly accelerating role of AI and ML at Oracle. Miranda promises to “dispel some of the hype and myths” while focusing on the very real AI-related issues of data, algorithms, feedback loops, and the inclusion of “the human element as a design principle.”
• He previews a look at “digital assistants, new partnerships, new industry solutions, new IoT innovations, powerful new customer data management capabilities, and a first reveal of the look and feel of our reimagined user experience.”

Disclosure: at the time of this writing, Oracle was a client of Cloud Wars Media LLC.

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