The Six Five team discusses Oracle’s CloudWorld event.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: Oracle CloudWorld, Lenovo TechWorld. Gosh, so many worlds out there. IBM earnings. We’re going to talk China and Biden chip meltdown. Well, meltdown probably for China, maybe for China. We’re going to talk about HPE’s investor conference called SAM. And we’re going to end up the day with a very surprising announcement from IBM and they came out with an ML Inference Card.
So, Daniel, I am going to call my own number here to kick off Oracle CloudWorld. Gosh, you and I spent- I think I spent two days, I think you spent a day but it felt like an eternity. And that’s not a negative thing but there were so many things to talk about.
Oracle is such a diverse company. I mean, they have core infrastructure. They have core database. And then they have all of this at a cloud. And they have one of the most popular enterprise SAS apps called Fusion, kind of end to end connecting the frontend to the backend. But hey, I’m going to keep this. I mean, we did videos on this. We have blogs coming out on this. I would’ve hit my top two announcements.
So, the first one was Oracle B2B Commerce. Now, don’t confuse this with their commerce tool. And I’ll have to tell you, it took me about three times to actually figure out what this is. This is a framework. This is an ecosystem for external vendors who are all on Oracle Fusion ERP to have more of a fluid and dynamic relationship.
So, what does that mean? So today, if you want to connect your ERP bank, an insurance company or even a shipping company, it typically takes four to eight weeks to integrate that in. And it’s Bespoke Code. But today or what was announced is they’re essentially partnering with companies like JP Morgan and FedEx out the gate.
So, those are literally modules. You sign in. You cross link. You put in your password and you’re tapping into JP Morgan and FedEx APIs. And you can just imagine where this goes into the future. Let’s say you’re a hospital and you want to buy an MRI and you don’t want to pay cash, you’d like to finance it.
Well, JP Morgan and in the future, other banks, would know exactly accounts receivable. They would know accounts payable. They would know how much inventory, the value and the working capital that you have. And therefore, it would be just a push button if you wanted to get some financing as opposed to what you and I go through today when we buy our capital assets where literally we’re getting three years of tax returns, personal and business. And pretty much, we have to name our next kid after the bank that lends us the money for something.
But expect more of these in the future. This is a really big deal and this is the start, just the start of what’s happening. The second thing I’m going to talk about, it wasn’t announced but it was a demo. You and I both agree that multi-cloud is where it’s at. And it’s funny, multi-cloud is here, it just takes a lot more resources than it should.
I don’t talk to a single enterprise that isn’t using multiple clouds. And no, I’m not counting Salesforce. I’m talking GCP, Azure, Oracle, AWS or Alibaba. And what I loved is the demo that Oracle showed which essentially had started off with your app is on AWS EC2 and you’re using Aurora as your database.
So, what you do is you get a secure link between OCI and AWS. You make the connection. You copy over the application that is containerized. You run that in OCI compute. But you’re hitting the same Aurora database over in AWS. And that connection can be as low as two milliseconds which I thought was pretty cool. That is the way it should work.
And even best, you can monitor both the AWS container and the OCI container on AWS’s app monitor observability platform called CloudWatch. So, that’s the way it should be. I mean, it’s so much closer to the vision of what multi-cloud should be.
I am impressed. Man, I put that out there. I got attacked. I think 27,000 people saw that tweet. And everybody came in saying, “Oh my God, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread,” to, “That is the worst architecture I have ever seen. You have to hate yourself to use it.”
But anyways, check out Forbes’ columns, Daniel’s future and research website and our last video that we did. Someday it will get up on my YouTube site, Daniel.
Daniel Newman: I think it’s already up, buddy. Check in real quick. Yeah. So, you hit on a couple of things. It was a really good event. I did want to say ephemerally, I really enjoyed hearing from Safra Catz, CEO of Oracle. She kicked off the event, not Larry. Larry did the afternoon keynote. I think he was on his plane from Hawaii in the morning coming in. It’s a tough life but someone’s got to do it.
But the morning sessions I thought were really great having some big customers across multiple industries. The industry’s thing was in focus for Oracle, for sure. And this is something that I think is going to be more and more part of every event’s narrative going forward. We’ve gone from kind of, “Let’s talk about the products,” to, “Let’s talk to our customers about how they are employing and deploying this technology to meaningfully improve their business.”
We joke about the backend to the frontend. We joked about it on our other pod. I’ll continue to joke about it. But Oracle really does have a very comprehensive offering with OCI, with database, with applications. It really does meet the enterprise need at scale.
I liked the example Steve Miranda gave in one of the analyst sessions where he talked about companies that are in the process of going public, run on NetSuite. And as you get bigger, you run on Fusion. I mean, the laundry list of logos that they’re able to flash up that are using fusion are impressive. And that’s been the underpinnings of that mid-double digit growth that we’ve seen quarter after quarter after quarter from Oracle.
Now, the truth is that they’re cloud business as a whole with all the parts of pieces. It’s only about 10 billion right now. I know, I said only about 10 billion right now. But that’s been really big growth. The infrastructure business is growing at great scale. And the company has a chance to do both market taking and market making because the overall demand for cloud is going to continue to grow.
But also with their pricing approach which is really all about making the commodities low price and then making the high value services their margin makers, it could be enticing to companies that are starting to move workloads to the cloud. Remember, we’re only about a quarter of the way of current workloads being moved to the cloud. And that doesn’t account for all the new data being created and all the new workloads that are going to be created on-prem over the next several years.
Cloud’s getting bigger. Oracle’s in a good position to take advantage of that. I like the end-to-end approach. I think the company’s in a good position. It was a good event and I’m going to leave it there.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
