What I would like Oracle to address this OpenWorld

I wrote a long - covering all what Oracle does - post last year before Oracle’s OpenWorld conference - you can find it here. Re-reading it before writing this post I found it surprisingly accurate - even one year later… tempted to ‘copy & paste’ it - I will try to only look at this post from the vantage point of my research areas - Next Generation Applications and Future of Work.
 

Database - Oracle will have to show traction for both 12c and the new in memory options. The announcements have been done, now it’s time to show what customers are doing, what interest partners are shown and drive the roadmap further.

Cloud - We attended Oracle’s Cloud analyst briefing earlier this year (findings here) - it is now time to see what Oracle will unveil from the large NDA portion it presented at the event. Be ready for a lot of XaaS (everything as a Service) products. More importantly Thomas Kurian said back then that Oracle wants to compete with AWS and be price competitive - so it will be interesting to see what Oracle does in this area. And let’s not forget out of the more or less 19M developers out there - 11M are Java developers. Will be key for Oracle to show the way forward - maybe unveiling a PaaS.

The key questions I will be asking are - what will Oracle be doing to enable developers to build modern, next generation applications, taking millions of database, middleware and Java developers by the hand into the cloud era.

HCM - Last year we challenged Oracle in regards of traction in Fusion HCM - and they responded by hijacking my agenda with customer meetings. The result was our report here – showing more traction than we and most industry watchers expected. Now it will be key to see how Oracle has used the last 12 months to build on that. We will also be watching on what Oracle has done and plans to do in the Talent Management space, particularly on Recruiting, where Oracle is the 800 pound gorilla with Taleo, but has not innovated much. Given the retirement challenges in the workforce that even newly appointed co-CEO Mark Hurd tweets about - the Oracle story needs to be good.

The key question I will be asking are - how will Oracle keep differentiating its HCM portfolio vis a vis the competition, innovate to keep it modern and how to develop and extend an attractive value proposition to HCM buyers out there.

Ping me on twitter for more observations and question I should be paying attention for in the frenzy days of Oracle OpenWorld 2014. Oracle has only scheduled 38 events / meetings / briefings for me – so this will be ‘slow’ conference… Find out where I am and what I think by following me on Twitter - @holgermu .