“It’s simply too hard and inefficient to continue on with the IT infrastructures of today. Vertically integrated, engineered systems and the cloud are all symptoms of the same reality – [users] need a simple, more effective way to drive IT,” said Hurd.
Hurd stated that four pillars of the Oracle plan for business analytics are headlined by research and development, vertical integration, building out industry solutions, and a “new generation of applications via the cloud.” To that end, Hurd says, in total by 2013, Oracle plans to spend nearly $15 billion on R&D, with the focus on business use of large data sets and on-demand services and storage. That development spending has been supplemented with nine acquisitions in this fiscal year.
The push toward cloud computing has almost been a mantra at Oracle in recent months, detailed in its Public Cloud offering by CEO Larry Ellison in October and in its nearly $2 billion deal for cloud talent management provider Taleo in February.
Hurd also shared his “passion” for analytics, one of the reasons Oracle made the contentious move to bring him in after his resignation from HP in August 2010. Hurd gave examples where highly tuned analytics systems can address customer relationship shortfalls in the airline and mobile phone industries, and said that good analytics boils down to “getting the right information to the right person at the right time to make the right decision.”
Hurd’s speech was followed by Oracle Analytics and Performance Management SVP Balaji Yelamanchili, who gave an overview of analytics offerings from the vendor. Oracle also formally updated or introduced a handful of new solutions tied to the keynote strategy.
New releases unveiled by Oracle Wednesday included: Enterprise Performance Management 11.1.2.2, with added application modules and integration via Oracle’s Exalytics in-memory database; new applications for supply chain and order management with SAP systems; and two new industry specific analytics offerings for manufacturing and asset management.
Justin Kern is senior editor at Information Management and can be reached at justin.kern@sourcemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @IMJustinKern.
