Oracle OpenWorld: Phillips stacks up the portfolio

In his keynote speech at Oracle OpenWorld, co-president Charles Philips stressed the importance of Oracle establishing a complete "stack" of technology that has been engineered to work together seamlessly – effectively an integrated suite of applications running from the back office to front, including CRM.

"Basically, we have a core technology foundation – middleware and database – and the range of applications harnesses the capabilities of that stack," he said. "Under the umbrella strategy, Oracle's database and Fusion Middleware support the Oracle infrastructure. The branches are the applications that leverage that core technology."

Despite the ongoing difficulty of turning some of its recent major acquisitions, in the CRM space, for example, into applications that appear in that stack, Philips said the watchword was "scalability", and being able to add incremental value at little cost (to Oracle) as well as improve the application owenership experience for customers.

"We want to change the ownership experience completely," he said. "We are trying to systematically reduce risk, systematically reduce cost, and improve the experience of owning software. We want to redefine the ownership experience."

But he admitted there was still a lot of uncertainty about the way things would turn out as the software industry has "never had a true test of what would happen" if a company continued to support and enhance its existing applications as well as debut a brand-new set of applications such as Fusion."It's unclear how it will play out," Phillips said. "It doesn't matter; we can afford it."

The company can also afford to carry on buying marketshare – and intends to do so. "We get proven R&D [research and development] which supplements what we've already invested in," he said. "We also get industry experts with decades of experience - a phenomenal asset for us."

Philips concluded that Oracle was the only company able to offer this and be in the enterprise applications space.

Phillips also unveiled 'Oracle Accelerate' - an expanded SMB programme that comprises industry-specific, pre-packed application bundles, rapid implementation tools and a growing network of certified Oracle applications resellers.

Oracle Accelerate's pre-packed application bundles are intended to be rapidly implemented and provide a wide range of industry-specific functionality. Working with the partner community, Oracle has identified 80 product and industry-specific bundles that can help companies quickly take advantage of Oracle's enterprise applications, without sacrificing flexibility and functionality.

"The introduction of Oracle Accelerate expands on our experience in the SMB market, and makes it faster and easier for customers and partners to leverage Oracle's leading enterprise applications," he added.

Oracle's rapid implementation tools - Oracle Business Accelerators - feature an automated setup tool that configures end-to-end business flows to decrease cost, risk and implementation time. The setup tool captures responses to simple questions about specific business requirements and then automatically applies that information to the application implementation. Once a customer has completed the set-up questionnaire, a new instance can be up and running in hours.

Chris Middleton
Contributing Editor

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