OpenWorld 2016 - Days 1 & 2

Before I came out here to OpenWorld I said that I wanted to focus on hearing customer stories and, maybe Oracle were listening because I haven't been disappointed so far. Customer advocacy is on everyone's lips and customer stories have featured heavily in key notes and general sessions alike. Monday's keynote from Mark Hurd featured no less than 8 customer stories. 

Joanna Fielding CFO of HSBC

I was interested to hear from Joanna Fielding, CFO of HSBC who told us how, in the past, HSBC had largely built its own technology. The strategy now is Lease/Buy/Build in that order. The legacy architecture at HSBC was inefficient for running back office processes so HSBC launched Project Velocity to replace it , selecting Oracle Cloud products.

HSBC have now implemented Oracle cloud ERP and EPM across half of their cost base with the 3 aims of increasing control, reducing costs and increasing cost transparency. 

One of the reasons that HSBC chose Oracle was that Oracle provided their 'A' team on the project but I was left wondering what the experience is like for smaller customers who may not get the 'A' team. With this in mind I had already put out a request to UKOUG members for their views on the Oracle Cloud experience, not just the success stories but the lessons learned including any feedback for Oracle that would help them understand customers' challenges. I didn't just ask because I'm interested but because Oracle genuinely want to hear a collective view from the global user groups. As I mentioned in my last blog, Oracle have invited me to a forum today to discuss just that. More about that next time.

Larry's keynote on Sunday started by focusing heavily on Oracle's position in the market compared to Amazon and Workday. I felt a sense of deja vu at this point as some of Larry's slides about competitors were the same as he used in 2015, though with over 70 slides in his presentation I suppose he could be forgiven for recycling a few. 

Larry did go on to talk about some new products that have been launched this year, including Oracle's Cloud@Customer service which is designed to help businesses who, due to regulatory or legislative restrictions, can't move their data into the public cloud.

Cloud@customer uses identical software and hardware as public cloud and has the same subscription pricing model, however it's managed by Oracle behind the customer's firewall on the customer's premises. Cloud@Customer was launched in March 2016. 

It'll be interesting to see how this service develops and what the take up is like.

Back to Mark Hurd's keynote and here he took the brave decision to ask the audience and anyone else who had logged on via https://pollev.com/openworld  to take part in a number of live polls. I guess that Mark may have thought that, having told the audience repeatedly that Oracle is the fastest growing cloud company, asking the question in a poll would lead to a clear answer. It seems like the audience were out for a bit of fun though with 25% answering Amazon, or perhaps Amazon were logged into the poll too - who knows !

For the avoidance of doubt, here's the 'correct' answer:

I'm off to meet my fellow user group leaders from EMEA now followed by the feedback forum with Oracle. News about both next time