The Six Five team discusses what is new within Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM).

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Transcript:

Patrick Moorhead: So Oracle has an enterprise SaaS suite called Fusion, and they do quarterly updates, and they updated ERP and EPM and took the advantage to take a few more swipes at SAP and some customer takeouts.

Daniel Newman: Yeah. Well, as we know, Oracle is never shy about calling out the competition. It starts at the top. Larry Ellison never misses a chance to claim a victory. It’s something that I find to be entertaining. We always talk about it here, competition drives innovation. We all have different ways. Some of us are the humble type. Some of us are the more outspoken types. But yeah, so each quarter, and I’ve really enjoyed this, Steve Miranda, the EVP that runs the Fusion and basically all the apps businesses for Oracle comes out and talks about what’s new.

So this week there was a series of meetings, and somewhere in between me packing my house and moving, I was able to attend and listen in. So as you know, there’s Fusion, there’s NetSuite, there’s Oracle Cloud, there’s lot of pieces. This particular go-around though, what I felt that Steve’s focus was really on was Oracle’s ML and AI efforts. This is a big topic. It’s happening across the board. There was a series of announcements, a new AI-driven interface called the Oracle Digital Assistant. Basically, when you’re working in these tools, there’s so much data, so many systems and records, so many screens.

Remember the little Microsoft paperclip, the Digital Assistant? Well, just imagine now having that kind of capability within your systems of record to be able to find what you need to find quickly using natural language processing. For instance, I’m just going to ask the question, and it’s going to work.

They also made a series of other announcements, an intelligent performance management platform, a risk management platform, a project management update, and of course, what Oracle does best, provided a series of customer wins and gave us the access to hear from these customers about what was going on. I’m not going to report on the whole thing. Again, Six Five, it’s about analysis, not about reporting.

But here’s the long and the short of what’s going on with Oracle. Oracle’s migration to a SaaS platform is enabling a faster scale of the business. This is where growth is coming. You can listen to any of their quarterly earnings, 20 to 30+% growth is coming out of their cloud applications business. They’re continuing to update it to add it. They’re making more and more ties from back office to front office. You love talking about that, Pat. I swear I said it first, but you said it better. But we’re bringing together the ERP, the CRM, the customer data platforms, the supply chain management tools. They’ve got all these things, and this layer of AI and ML is going to be a very important step for the company.

They’re not necessarily being credited with the same level as, say, a Salesforce or a Microsoft or some of the other players for the amount of investment and deployment of AI and ML capabilities, but with all this flexibility with SaaS, with Oracle Cloud, with that full vertical integration, borrowing a productivity collaboration suite, Oracle, they’re really moving toward that full staff, and they are moving towards a system that can be quickly updated that can have overlays of AI and ML capabilities.

And by the way, it’s just ripe for a acquisition of some type that’s going to focus on this area of AI and ML, but they’re building it, they’re integrating it, they’re adding it into their suite across their product platform. And I thought that was the most positive takeaway was they’re not just idling by. This is going to be an important part of their business going forward.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. A lot of this conversation reminded me too about … I was thinking, “What the heck is Salesforce going to do?” Oracle seems to be having a tremendous amount of success out there. And by the way, we’ll put the caveat on the SAP stuff. SAP usually comes out a week later and says, “Hey, here are the customers we took away from Oracle.” So getting to the bottom of all this is interesting. What is it? 30% growth that we’re seeing in many of these applications I think is proof positive that Oracle is making a dent in this.

And the full stack capability, it’s funny, I’ve been in tech over 30 years, and it’s almost like an accordion. You have aggregation, and you have disaggregation, where disaggregation or where best parts that are integrated together is the way to go. And then the industry goes integration, where it’s hard to differentiate on the piece parts, and it’s a lot more valuable to put those together with security or in the same place.

You’ve got all these point security products, but there’s so much integration that enterprises have to do that sometimes they’re two or three steps behind what the best in class software was, and that’s why the security industry is going to more of an integration point, and companies like Microsoft and Cisco are taking advantage of that. I’m sorry to digress, but you did a really good job capturing the news itself.

Daniel Newman: You’re entitled, sir.