Oracle’s largest acquisition to date—that of Sun Microsystems—also has been delivering benefits to the Oracle marketplace, Braham continues. The acquisition, which took place 4 years ago, “has led to a growing focus on fully integrated solutions that combine both hardware and software, optimized to work together,” he says. “This solutions-based approach has been generally well-received by the customer base and has also led to an increased focus by competing application and platform vendors to develop pre-configured and optimized solutions around specific workloads.”
Braham believes that opportunity exists for vendors to develop purpose-built platforms to deliver solutions engineered from the ground up in support of key applications such as Oracle and SAP HANA. “While Oracle has created a single vendor solution stack, other players in the IT ecosystem are forging strong partnerships to participate in this emerging space,” he says.
Speed isn’t just an issue for Oracle’s database offerings—it is impacting the ERP side of the business as well. “We’re in the early days of an ERP culture shift, a postmodern ERP, and it’s very exciting,” said Sandra Kurtzig, founder and CEO of Kenandy. “The impact of the cloud and the approaching postmodern ERP will transform the industry. Traditional ERP models like Oracle and SAP’s require costly, extensive customizations for each enterprise. This means that upgrades tend to be clunky, expensive, and slow.”
Cloud-based solutions and multitenant software are addressing these issues in on-premises ERP systems, Kurtzig continued. “Enterprises can now receive software updates seamlessly, without sacrificing the customizations they put in place.” But that’s not the only feature of a better ERP, Kurtzig added. “Today, enterprises are looking for systems that are agile, so they quickly deploy in new geographies and acquisitions. They expect these systems to run their business processes, not pre-defined processes. The systems need to be easy to configure, using clicks instead of code. Cloud-based ERP users can add sophisticated features to their systems without having a technical background.”
For many organizations, embracing new technology and methods such as database as a service or big data is more than an academic concept discussed at conferences and in the trade press; it is a tangible part of everyday business. Many organizations are focusing on faster delivery of applications, differentiated products and services, and some are building new customer experiences through mobile technology. The ability to manage and assure 24x7 database performance, regardless of workloads and user demands, is key to agility and growth.