OpenWorld: Oracle's Vision For the Cloud

At OpenWorld 2011 in San Francisco, Oracle continued the stream of announcements and focused on the cloud, launching its public cloud and making Oracle applications available in the cloud.

Oracle Public Cloud

During his keynote Wednesday Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced the Oracle Public Cloud, a broad set of services that provide customers with subscription-based, self-service access to Oracle Fusion Applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Database, all managed and hosted by Oracle. Oracle Fusion Applications available in the cloud include Fusion CRM, Fusion HCM, Oracle Social Network, Database Cloud service, and a Java Cloud service.

“The Oracle Public Cloud is a little different,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “The Oracle Public Cloud is both a platform as a service and applications as a service.  The key difference is the Oracle Public Cloud is based on industry standards and supports full interoperability with other clouds and your datacenter on premise.”

Oracle Social Network

Also during the Ellison keynote: Oracle announced its Social Network, an enterprise collaboration and social networking tool for business. Billed as a way to talk with people within the enterprise or across enterprises, the Social Network enables a range of collaboration tools, including personal profiles, groups, activity feeds, status updates, discussion forums, document sharing, co-browsing and editing, instant messaging, email, and web conferencing.

Oracle designed it to be secure for meeting corporate demands as well as giving mobile users a way to stay connected and participate in business conversations. “The biggest change over the past few years is social networking,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.  “Today, organizations want to connect their people, their applications, their processes and their customers. Oracle Social Network provides that; all the tools are integrated and employees can work from anywhere in the world with the devices best suited to their job.”

Oracle Fusion CRM

Oracle unveiled the public cloud offering of Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management (CRM). As a part of the Oracle Public Cloud the enterprise-grade CRM is a powerful application in a simple subscription pricing model – with no hardware to buy or software to support. Fusion CRM Cloud will enable organizations to integrate sales territory management and quota management, combine customer and product master data, deliver a consolidated call center for all CRM processes, and improve lead generation processes by managing customer dialogs with multi-stage campaigns and standardized lead qualification processes.

Oracle Mobile

Oracle announced that a range of their applications have been built with the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF), which means that they are immediately available and certified to run on any mobile web browser. Oracle Fusion Tap is a collection of mobility application modules that work across the Oracle Fusion Applications Suite to provide mobile workers the ability to be productive anywhere and anytime. Introduced on Wednesday,  Oracle Fusion MobileSales drives further sales team productivity by enabling direct access of Oracle Fusion CRM within iPhone and Blackberry, and allowing instant access and team sharing of important customer, contact and opportunity details within smartphones. Additional mobile-enabled applications include Oracle CRM, Oracle's PeopleSoft, E-Business Suite, Oracle's JD Edwards, and Oracle Hyperion Performance Management.

"Applications built with Oracle ADF Mobile provide organizations mobile capabilities they need for mission critical sales success. At the same time, Oracle will continue to leverage the upcoming Oracle ADF Mobile platform to innovate and deliver new and industry-defining applications across the entire enterprise," said Chris Leone, Group Vice President of Application Development, Oracle.