Larry’s OOW16 Sunday Keynote
Larry’s Sunday night keynote at OpenWorld is always good value. He’s a rare beast in that he’s a CEO (or now ex-CEO) who can talk the language of the business but also gets the tech behind it. He litters his slide commentary with digs at the competition which is always entertaining too.
So, what were the big ticket items that impact us in the world of Oracle Cloud this year?
Cloud@Customer
In a move clearly aimed at Government departments and companies with stringent security requirements, Larry announced Cloud@Customer.
The service provides the same hardware and software as that which runs in the Oracle Public Cloud, but behind your firewall. It’s managed by Oracle and you don’t pay for the hardware, it’s all part of the subscription pricing. Larry said that it’s the same price as if it were in Oracle’s Cloud too, which would be amazing if that comes to pass as the Cloud is normally significantly cheaper.
My understanding of this is that it’s not ‘HCM/ERP Cloud within your Firewall’, unless you subscribe to Cloud@Customer as infrastructure and then install HCM Cloud yourself.
Cloud Adoption – ERP
Larry also talked about the customer success that the Cloud applications have been gaining, and contrasted it with the competitors.
He showed this slide comparing the breadth of the ERP Cloud functionality vs Workday Financials:
Larry went on to say that ERP Cloud has 10x the number of Workday Financials customers, but that Workday are not catching up – ERP Cloud has twice their growth rate.
These were the numbers and geographic spread as-of the end of Oracle’s Q4, there’s another 200 on top of these now.
Cloud Adoption – HCM
Larry surprised many by announcing that HCM Cloud is selling 2.5x as fast as Workday (900 new customers in FY16, compared to Workday’s 318).
Aggressive Competition with Amazon
Now that Larry believes that the SaaS and PaaS areas of the Oracle Cloud stack are moving along nicely he drew focus onto the Infrastructure as a Service area. He announced that Oracle are going to compete much more aggressively with Amazon in this space, showing some comparisons where Oracle Public Cloud delivers more power for less money than an equivalent AWS instance.
More Tools for Building Cloud Apps
Larry announced more functionality within the Oracle Developer Cloud, including wider language support, more APIs and better integration. He also announced a development platform for extending the SaaS applications without writing any code, which he then went on to demo with a fun chatbot application:
Slick and amusing, it showed a chat based interaction between Larry and the Oracle Cloud (touching on both procurement and HCM). Of course, this is only the next step – voice interaction is the logical next one – however, it’s functionality that keeps Oracle ahead of the competition.
Machine Learning
Some of the OOW announcements are “the product is Generally Available” and some are more of an “it’s in the medium-term future” announcement. Larry’s announcement of Machine Learning AI felt a little more like the latter, however, in the near future we can expect our Cloud applications to apply machine learning algorithms to predict business decisions, such as Optimised Payment Terms in ERP and Best-Fit Candidates in HCM.
The full keynote can be seen here.
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