Oracle Announces Major Upgrades Across Its Cloud Services, Emphasises Security

B&T’s man on the ground and editor of www.which-50.com, Andrew Birmingham, is at Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience event in Las Vegas. And he’s filed this…

Cloud computing is less expensive, more reliable and far more secure than on premise solutions and most importantly it provides customers with modern apps and new capabilities, according to Oracle CEO Mark Hurd.

He was addressing his comments to journalists following his keynote speech at Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience (#mme16) event in Las Vegas this week. In that speech he told the 2200 attendees that on average corporate applications were typically close to two decades old.

Do the math, he told them, applications that old predate the digital era, they predate search and social. And he said it was important to understand that cloud was still in its infancy with the top four cloud app vendors generating a combined $US25 billion out of an annualised corporate IT spend of $US950.

“Imagine when cloud is $50 billion or $100 billion,” he said.

Later in comments to reporters, Hurd was particularly keen to emphasis security considerations. The Oracle chief said he was constantly asked if Oracle could provide a more secure outcome than a company’s own on-premises environment.

“I always say no, our cloud is more secure. Look at it this way, we have over 50 per cent of the database market so probably 50 per cent of all the data sits in our databases. We know our customers are a year behind on (security) patching.”

“We get attacked all the time so we see all the tricks,” he said. “We actually trick those guys and let them into sandboxes. So we say, yep you are in, then we can see what they are doing. We want see all their SQL injections, We want to see all the things they do to steal data. So we we are contemporary whether it is a nation state threat, organized crime, or  a guy in his pyjamas in his basement.  We then make patches to stay ahead and we send those patches out.”

According to Hurd, “Our cloud is fully patched to the minute, our customers not so much.”

As Oracle has rearchitectured its solutions towards cloud services in recent years the company has also captured its own huge efficiency benefit.

Its $5 billion R&D budget now stretches much further as the teams devoted to ERP and human capital management, marketing, and customer experience share a single development environment making the sharing of work much easier.

“If our head of apps was here he would tell you that our teams are three to three a half times more productive than they were 3 or 4 years ago under the old model.”

Announcements

So just what have all those roughly 7500 developers been up to, recently.

Oracle announced a slew of improvements to its cloud services at its event this week in the areas of data marketing, account based marketing and customer experience.

On the data marketing front the company said its latest additions are designed to help marketers use differentiated audience, data for targeting on their paid media, orchestrate cross-channel interactions and further optimize the customer experience.

Integrations between Oracle Maxymiser and Oracle Responsys applications are designed to help orchestrate Oracle Maxymiser-delivered messaging on a website in conjunction with messaging in email, SMS, MMS, push messaging, in-app messaging and display advertising.

Maxymiser has also  been fully integrated with the Oracle Data Management Platform to let marketers to tap into first, second and third party data and use it for audience testing and optimization initiatives.

Marketers can now also model their online audiences based on critical offline data, such as in-store purchase transactions according the annoucements.

A second integration gives customers access to Oracle Data Cloud’s AddThis Audience Discovery tool, which helps marketers better understand and target their ideal audience with relevant paid media campaigns.

Account based marketing

New account-based marketing capabilities have been built into Oracle Marketing Cloud to help business-to-business (B2B) marketers increase lead generation, reduce sales cycles and improve conversion rates.

By supporting the entire B2B buyers’ journey from acquisition and prospecting to closing new business, Oracle says the new Account-Based Marketing capabilities enable B2B marketers to optimize targeting on paid media, effectively engage target prospects and simplify data management and integration.

On the customer experience front Oracle Sales Cloud now includes new mobile capabilities. A new Call Report app lets sales reps perform critical and frequent call report tasks on the go, while a new Mobile Commissions app lets sales reps review their compensation anywhere, any time.

The company has also updated Oracle Commerce Cloud with visual merchandising and automated recommendation capabilities to help merchandisers to better understand the consumer experience and offer more responsive personalized interactions.

In addition, an upgrade to Oracle CPQ Cloud helps organizations optimize commerce across channels by providing support for flexible document generation.