Wednesday 28 October 2015

Oracle Open World 2015 Day 2 & 3

Open World is such a busy week that I've hardly had time to stop since I arrived. Luckily, I'm still feeling slightly jet lagged so am finding time to catch up on emails and write this blog in the early hours of the morning. 

On Monday morning Mark Hurd delivered his keynote announcing Oracle's vision for digital transformation to 2025. He started by explaining that that the on-premise operating model is unsustainable, based on 20 year old applications that were built pre internet, pre mobile and pre cloud. The cost of maintaining these applications is rising, not least because of the expense of keeping them secure, with cybersecurity costs rising by 10% per year.

Mark went on to say that this is why cloud has been such an important shift in the industry; because it allows companies to run their applications from a lower cost base with easy , rapid innovation - a simple matter of economics.

Mark announced his predictions for the next 10 years which included Oracle being at the forefront of the transition to cloud. He went as far as to predict that by 2025 only two suite providers will dominate 80% of the SaaS market, with the remaining 20% made up of point solutions, rather than full enterprise suites, and of course, he does expect Oracle to be one of the two.


Eva Harström, CIO of Skanska Nordic took to the stage during Tuesday morning's keynote.
Eva Harström , Skanska
Eva spoke about how the digital shift is transforming what and how Skanska build, with the company move towards an automated construction site. Skanska are already re-thinking what is needed in order to deliver design and construction, with enterprise architects becoming a key part of the design of the built environment. 

This awareness within enterprises of the digital shift has been a recurrent theme of the conference this year. David Bartlett, CTO of GE Aviation explained the rapid move towards digital by telling us that GE had gone to bed as an industrial company and woke up as a software company.

Larry Ellison's keynote on Tuesday afternoon announced Oracle's Silicon Secured Memory, an 'always on' hardware-based memory protection which stops unintentional or malicious access of data in memory. Larry told us that if this had been around at the time of Heartbeat or Venom, it would have shut them down in real-time. 

One of the concerns that many organisations still have about the move to cloud is around the confidentiality of the data. Larry challenged us all to ask our SaaS providers if their technical people can see our data, suggesting that the answer will almost always be 'yes'. 

This, he went on to say , is where Oracle SaaS applications are different; they are all encrypted and only the customer holds the key. This level of security was demanded by financial institutions but is available to all Oracle customers.

I attended a lunch on Monday, hosted by Jeb Dasteel, Oracle's Senior Vice President and Chief Customer Officer, where user group representatives heard about a new community site that's about to be launched. Here, Oracle customers will be able to find a single portal into all the user group sites around the world. 

I'm sure this portal will be developed further over the coming months as more international groups come on board so will look forward to sharing more news as it happens via the UKOUG.

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