Oracle Challenges SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce over Industry-Cloud Suites

As every major SaaS player surges into the red-hot market for industry clouds and industry-specific solutions, Oracle is cranking up the heat by offering complete suites of vertical-market applications.

On my weekly Cloud Wars Top 10 rankings, Oracle is #6. But on my Industry Cloud Top 10, Oracle is #3—and this new achievement will likely give it significant new momentum in the vertical-solutions marketplace.

During the Industry Cloud Battleground digital event hosted this week by Cloud Wars and our event partner, Dynamic Communities Inc., the leader of Oracle’s vertical business units, executive VP Mike Sicilia, explained how this new initiative fuses code from Oracle’s horizontal cloud apps—ERP, HCM, CX, supply chain—into its wide array of vertical apps.

Sicilia outlined this new approach in Oracle’s 20-minute presentation during the Industry Cloud Battleground event. Each of the 7 participating sponsors—Workday, Google Cloud, IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and ServiceNow—had 20 minutes to address a standard set of five questions exploring the business value each company’s offerings can provide to customers.

“All of our vertical applications, all of our vertical suites, are at least in some way integrated with our ERP systems, our CX systems, our HCM systems, supply-chain systems, and so forth,” said Sicilia.

“That’s been the case for many, many years, and it’s one of the things customers have come to appreciate is that fact that we can deliver true vertical suites: the operating technologies that are at the very front end or at the edge if you will; the back-office solutions like ERP and HCM; and those that touch customers like CX all come together in a suite.”

As a prime example, Sicilia cited a new Oracle product called “DX for C,” which stands for Digital Experience for Communications. Aimed at a set of powerful companies that used to be called telcos and are now more commonly referred to as communications service providers or CSPs, Oracle’s DX for C transcends the current notion of “integration,” Sicilia said.

As a result, the new application can enable CSPs and their customers to each do things that were never before possible.

“This goes well beyond integration and is a key differentiator in our vertical-cloud solution,” Sicilia said.

“We’re creating vertically specific code in our CX platform. We’ve created a version of our CX platform that is specifically oriented for telco providers that combines our operating technology and all the core aspects of the CX suite together into a bundle so that our CSP customers can offer a new and differentiated experience by using chatbots and AI and all these things to their customers. 

“So if I’m a CSP customer and I want to go to my mobile provider and change my service—I want to add internet, I want to get rid of internet, I want to add streaming services or over-the-top services or whatever it may be—I can do all of that in an automated portal which is delivered as part of this DX for C transformative cloud service,” Sicilia said.

That fusion of horizontal capabilities and purpose-built applications that encompass what Sicilia calls “operating technology” automates in real time what can otherwise be time-consuming, cumbersome and error-prone processes: billing, provisioning, orchestration and more.

“I think what we’re doing there goes well beyond integrating applications—we’re actually writing applications from the ground up that are vertically oriented and include the operating technology,” Sicilia said.

“This is unique in the industry, and we plan to do a heck of a lot more of it with other industries as well.”

So SAP, Salesforce and Microsoft, the challenge has been made: does Oracle have something truly unique here? 

We’ll be following up so we can share the latest developments in the hottest sector of the greatest sustained growth market the world has ever known.

Disclosure: at the time of this writing, Oracle, Salesforce and SAP were all clients of Cloud Wars Media LLC and/or Evans Strategic Communications LLC, and all 3 were participating sponsors of the Industry Cloud Battleground.

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