Corporate
The
most significant news of the month came as Oracle announced its Fiscal
Year 2014 4th quarter and year-end results. Under the headline "Oracle
Becomes the Second Largest Cloud SaaS Company in the World",
the company announced fiscal 2014 Q4 total revenues that were up 3% to
$11.3 billion. Software and Cloud revenues were up 4% to $8.9 billion.
Non-GAAP SaaS and PaaS revenues were up 23%
to $327 million. In addition, Cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)
revenues were up 13% to $128 million. New software licenses revenues
were unchanged at $3.8 billion. Software license updates and product
support revenues were up 7% to $4.7 billion. Overall
hardware systems revenues were up 2% to $1.5 billion with hardware
systems products up 2% to $870 million, and hardware systems support up
2% to $596 million.
Oracle's continued quest to provide the best solutions to customers around the world was underlined by two acquisitions:
- MICROS Systems, Inc, a provider of integrated software and hardware solutions to the Hospitality and Retail industries. Together, Oracle and MICROS will help hotels, food & beverage facilities, and retailers to accelerate innovation, transform their businesses, and delight customers with complete, open and integrated solutions.
- LiveLOOK, a leading provider of real-time, visual collaboration technology for co-browsing and screen sharing. LiveLOOK’s cloud-based co-browse technology enables customer service and sales agents to collaborate and visually guide consumers through web and mobile environments to resolve issues effectively and improve the quality of buying decisions. Oracle has over 100 global customers using LiveLOOK’s co-browse technology as an embedded part of Oracle Service Cloud offering.
Oracle Database, Middleware and Technology
The most important product announcement of the month was Oracle
Database In-Memory. This delivers leading-edge in-memory
performance without the need to restrict functionality or accept
compromises, complexity and risk. Deploying Oracle Database In-Memory
with virtually any existing Oracle Database-compatible
application is as easy as flipping a switch--no application changes are
required. It is fully integrated with Oracle Database’s renowned
scale-up, scale-out, storage tiering, availability and security
technologies making it the most industrial-strength offering
in the industry.
The
topic of Big Data was the subject of a significant joint announcement
by Oracle and one of its major customers in Spain, CaixaBank - a
Centre of Excellence in Barcelona to deliver Big Data
related services to customers all over Europe. The center will exploit
the experience gained in the first phase of implementation of
CaixaBank’s new Big Data infrastructure, a project that was initiated
in December 2013 and that has been developed with Oracle in
record time. According to Juan María Nin, Vice President and CEO of the
group, “being one of the first financial institutions in the world in
incorporating Big Data in daily business management
means a reinforcement of our bet on innovation, one of the strategic
lines of CaixaBank."
Another key Technology topic - Services Oriented Architecture, or SOA - was the subject of two related product announcements: Oracle
SOA Suite 12c and Oracle Business Process Management (BPM) Suite 12c. With simplified
cloud, mobile, on-premises, and Internet of Things (IoT) integration capabilities, all within a single platform, Oracle SOA Suite 12c helps
organizations speed time to integration, improve productivity, and lower TCO. The new release of Oracle Business Process Management Suite (Oracle BPM Suite) 12c not
only helps
businesses optimize and automate their business processes, but it
enables them to establish deeper connections that will drive ongoing
engagement.
The
burgeoning area of Private Cloud saw another Tech announcement from the
company. IT organizations are adopting private clouds as a
stepping-stone to business-driven, self-service
IT. Successful implementations hinge on the ability to efficiently
deploy and manage cloud services at enterprise scale. Having a complete
cloud management solution integrated with an enterprise-class technology
stack is a fundamental requirement for IT. The
company announced Oracle
Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4 to meet that
requirement by helping businesses become more agile and responsive,
while reducing cost, complexity, and risk.
Finally in the Tech arena, Oracle has released
innovations in Oracle Mobile Suite, which includes the new Oracle Mobile Application Framework (MAF) with an updated version
of Oracle Service Bus, These enhancements empower developers to create new, highly scalable, secure mobile applications
faster and in an easier way, as part of the Oracle Mobile Platform.
Systems
In support of Oracle Database In-Memory, Oracle announced the
latest in its line of workload-specific, enterprise-class servers, the Sun Server X4-4 and Sun Server X4-8.
Co-engineered with Oracle software, these servers are the first to
include elastic computing features, maximizing performance by adapting
to different workload demands in real time. The Sun Server X4-4 is
designed specifically for business intelligence and analytics and server
consolidation, while the Sun Server X4-8 is the best x86 platform for
Oracle Database In-Memory option and scale-up
applications. Oracle’s x86 servers are key building blocks for Oracle
Engineered Systems.
Oracle announced
enhancements to Oracle’s ZFS Storage ZS3 Series. It now
provides a fast, efficient way to accelerate virtual machine (VM)
deployment and monitoring, while virtually eliminating boot storms. The
midrange ZFS Storage ZS3-2 can boot over 16,000 simultaneous
VMs in under seven minutes. Also, cloud capabilities have been extended
in Oracle ZFS Storage OS 8.2. Supporting these announcements, the
company also announced that Oracle
ZFS Storage ZS3-2 set a new SPC-2/E world record, demonstrating the best overall price/performance and the most efficient energy use with the highest performance per watt.
Another Oracle Engineered Systems announcement came in the form of Oracle’s
next-generation Virtual Compute Appliance. Often,
integrating compute, network and storage infrastructure from several
vendors, then provisioning and configuring these systems becomes a
central impediment to the responsiveness required in today's
fast-moving business environment. Oracle’s Virtual Compute Appliance
allows companies to streamline these critical tasks with a single,
integrated system designed to run virtually any application and support
cloud services.
Finally in Systems news, Oracle announced that it is expanding
its application-driven software defined networking (SDN) capabilities in Oracle Solaris 11.2 with
plans to integrate OpenDaylight SDN. The integration is intended to
allow customers to improve service quality and take advantage of
apps-to-disk SLAs
through compatibility with a wide range of SDN devices, applications
and services. It will also allow them to use a common and open SDN
platform with OpenStack to manage Oracle Solaris-based clouds. Oracle
has joined the OpenDaylight Project as a Silver Member.
Applications
In a cloud-oriented move, Oracle announced that it has extended
the simplicity, mobility, and extensibility of the Oracle applications user experience.
Available to Oracle Sales Cloud and Oracle HCM Cloud customers, the
latest additions enhance productivity and efficiency by further
simplifying information access,
embedding new visualization and analytic capabilities, and adding new
extensibility and customization options. This next evolution of the user
experience has been optimized for tablets and smartphones, so user
productivity doesn’t slow down when the user is
working from a mobile device.
Industries
Helping Communications Service Providers (CSPs), Oracle announced the
latest release of Oracle Communications EAGLE Equipment Identity Register,
which supports device registration for long-term evolution (LTE)
smartphones and other LTE-connected devices and enables CSPs to connect
to the Central Equipment Identity
Register (CEIR), the global registry of blacklisted devices maintained
by the GSMA. Oracle Communications Equipment Identity Register now
supports access to the GSMA database via the Diameter protocol and
allows CSPs to block LTE devices, building on the product’s
earlier support for blocking devices on 2G and 3G networks and
accessing the database via the SS7 protocol.
In another Comms industry announcement, Oracle announced Oracle
Communications Application Orchestrator, a product to
support CSPs in their migration to Network Functions Virtualization
(NFV). This enables CSPs to accelerate the convergence of their IT and
network domains and bring new services and applications
to the marketplace more quickly.
And for the Health Sciences industry, Oracle announced Oracle
Health Sciences Data Management Workbench. Using Oracle
Health Sciences Data Management Workbench, researchers can integrate,
reconcile and analyze clinical data faster and more accurately, which
automates data load, transform and cleanse processes.
As a result, study sponsors can make faster, more informed decisions
that improve control, support adaptive studies and accelerate clinical
trials and time to market.
Partners
There
was a significant Partner element to the month's main Technology
announcement, Oracle Database In-Memory. Its introduction gives ISVs the
ability to supercharge their applications
to deliver even faster insights, analysis and reporting, while speeding
online transaction processing; enabling them to establish a real-time
enterprise. Helping ISVs take full advantage of this new offering, Oracle
PartnerNetwork’s Oracle Database Ready certification now includes Oracle Database In-Memory.
On June 25th, Oracle welcomed its partners around the globe to the
annual Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) kickoff, where it
provided them with the strategies, insights, and resources they need to
succeed and profit with Oracle in the current fiscal year. Hosted by
Oracle executives, the live, virtual session unveiled
new OPN enablement resources, including new incentive programs,
designed to help partners innovate faster, service customers better,
differentiate themselves in the market and grow their businesses with
Oracle. During the kick-off, the company announced that
Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) is extending its Oracle Exastack program to
give partners the opportunity to achieve Oracle Exastack Ready or
Optimized status for Oracle Big Data Appliance and Oracle Database
Appliance.
For a replay of the event, visit http://bit.ly/1pgDjXL