JANUARY 15, 2013

Dubai: Ramping up efforts to expand cloud computing worldwide, Mark Hurd, president of Oracle Corporation, kicked off Oracle CloudWorld in Dubai -- an international tour of event series -- to shed light on the technology giant's ambitious cloud strategy. Subsequent stops of the 10-city roadshows are scheduled to take place in London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Mumbai, Munich, New York City, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo. 

Briefing journalists, Hurd pointed out that Oracle being the first in the region to initiate a drive to promote cloud services, the company is in an advantageous position to tap opportunities in the Middle East. "Today we have over 10,000 customers and more than 25 million users of the Oracle cloud," he added.

"Security is not a concern," he said, adding: "the company has its own infrastructure." It may be recalled that some experts had discovered security flaws in its Jawa software a few days ago and that they said hackers were exploiting to attack computers. 

On the investment front, Hurd stated that in this fiscal year, the corporation has invested $5 billion in cloud computing and in the past three years, the company's figure in research and development of cloud has touched $13 billion. 

To a question, he explained that various acquisitions are expected to augment profit margins as the world's largest enterprise software company fends off smaller rivals offering similar products.

Some of the acquisitions Oracle has used to beef up its offerings in cloud services include RightNow Technologies for $1.5 billion and Taleo Corporation for $1.9 billion. Oracle said it would buy Collective Intellect, which tracks and analyses customers' comments on social media. 

Last month, the US-based company also agreed for the buyout of DataRaker to expand in smart-grid analytics platforms that enable water, power and other utilities to use data to increase efficiencies.

Oracle's cloud services applications include human capital management, talent management, sales and marketing, customer experience, financial management, procurement sourcing, inventory, project management and governance risk, compliance. 

Earlier yesterday, in his key note address to over 2,000 delegates from 20 different countries here, Mark Hurd detailed Oracle's strategy and the trends driving cloud. He said there are 9 billion Internet devices in the world, which will balloon to 50 billion by 2020.

Stating that the number of Internet users today exceeds 2 billion worldwide and global Internet penetration is estimated to grow from 35.3 per cent in 2012 to 42.8 per cent in 2016, he said 90 per cent of all Internet users now have an account on at least one social service, and there are more than 13 million business pages on Facebook alone. 

While elaborating on data production, the Oracle president said that it will be 44 times greater in 2020 than it was in 2009, reaching a worldwide total of eight trillion gigabytes by 2015. Hence, Hurd added, companies are searching for solutions that will provide the unprecedented capacity, scalability, and speed to keep pace with that explosive growth.  

Later, a senior Oracle executive said that clouds are often one or two dimensional. Oracle Cloud delivers on all 3 dimensions of transformational technologies like social and, mobile for a more powerful and innovative experience, he added. 

© Times of Oman 2013