In this Acceleration Economy Roundtable, Aaron Back welcomes fellow analyst and multi-time CIO Wayne Sadin, along with special guests Oracle VP of Products and Strategy Leo Leung and Andrew de la Torre, Group VP of Technology for Oracle Communications, for a discussion on the evolution of communication technology.
Highlights
00:11 — Aaron introduces today’s panel of guests: fellow Acceleration Economy analyst Wayne Sadin and Oracle’s Leo Leung and Andrew de la Torre.
02:20 — Devices, settings, and methods of communication are evolving fast. Many CXOs face challenges as expectations around communication tech’s capabilities rise.
02:57 — Wayne separates interpersonal communication from communication that occurs between devices. The industry is going through enormous software upgrades and immense, de-regulated competition.
04:18 — Wayne outlines what communication tech must have to succeed: security, availability, bandwidth, zero latency, and at the lowest possible cost.
04:40 — The infrastructure supporting device communication is a complex, often behind-the-scenes ecosystem.
05:11 — Smart tech — like Apple watches that can measure heart rates, refrigerators that can order groceries, and other pieces of this ecosystem — are all part of the “connected world.” The industry is shifting away from the consumer and toward interconnected services; de la Torre cites 5G as a prime example.
08:40 — CIOs are looking for partners offering an industry-specific set of tools, a resilient network to depend on, and deep industry knowledge.
09:38 — Leung outlines how Oracle facilitates businesses running services (or providing services to customers) through cloud tools made available on the building-block level.
12:11 — De la Torre reports several findings on decision-makers looking to build connected services. Cloud tech integration complexity was among the top concerns among decision-makers, with 75% reporting a preference for connectivity to be baked into their tech solutions from the beginning.
13:20 — Connectivity is now assumed to be a fundamental component of industry-specific solutions. If the industry sticks with the old way of building machine-to-machine technology, the complexity of getting them to “talk” to one another will become too immense to manage.
15:24 — de la Torre recounts decades of increased regulatory and competitive pressures on service providers.
17:59 — Oracle cloud brings the intellectual property of thousands of developers into a technology stack, allowing engineers to spend more time on customer-facing applications rather than the established infrastructure.
19:54 — Oracle’s first customer belonged to the U.S. intelligence community. Security is “baked into Oracle’s company DNA.”
22:11 — Oracle aims to provide its customers with more security at no additional cost. “More security is better, automating is better.”
25:05 — Oracle’s philosophy revolves around producing the most potent technology possible to make a difference in a diverse market.
26:20 — “The industry can’t survive on continuing to make sure people connect WhatsApp and Facebook…it isn’t where the growth is.” de la Torre details the power of cloud-native services.
29:13 — What sets Oracle apart from other telco clouds? Leung explains the flexibility Oracle’s global reach provides.
33:59 — Both the consumer and commercial sides are each witnessing everything growing more connected. Wayne suggests communication companies must be able to support “B2B2B2C” industries: industries with partners several steps removed from the end customer.
37:37 — Oracle’s vaccine monitoring solution, V-safe, was built in 10 weeks and has since become the largest real-world patient data gathering platform in the world for a single therapeutic area with 10.4 million verified users. Cloud services need to act and deploy quickly.
39:29 — Leung points out that even today’s roundtable call is able to handle video and audio via Oracle infrastructure. Virtual and augmented reality is just around the corner, with increasing amounts of data being pushed quickly around the world.
42:28 — Aaron wraps the discussion on Oracle, telco tools, and the use of communications technologies.
On-demand video from the Cloud Wars Expo event is rolling out now, with more than 40 hours of cloud education content — featuring 100-plus speakers — to be made available in the coming days. All content is free to Acceleration Economy subscribers with an on-demand pass.
