Tag: oracle

Inoapps releases Oracle podcasts

Posted on July 17, 2018 by - News

radio Oracle Platinum Reseller Inoapps has launched a series of podcasts for customers and other stakeholders.

The fortnightly podcasts aim to share ideas and concepts from Inoapps’ experience around the globe, whilst also exploiting the company’s closeness with Oracle itself. The podcasts will cover a variety of topic areas including:

• Interviews with Oracle Management

• Interviews with Inoapps’ customers from around the globe

• Customer Case Studies

• Best practice ideas and policies

• Market trends and topical themes

• Views from the US and ASEAN territories

• Technical Product Assistance and Guidance

Inoapps’ Head of UK and EMEA Region, Andrew Norris, said in a statement : “As a global player with operations in the US, the ASEAN territories and EMEA, Inoapps has a wealth of expertise and advice that it can share with other Oracle users. We can also draw upon the exceptionally strong relationship with Oracle that we have built up as a frequent recipient of Oracle partner awards across the years. From our customer research, we know that podcasts are an ideal medium for dissemination of key content and customer information – hence our significant and ongoing investment in this format.

“The first podcast is an interview with Oracle’s Simon Hill, who highlights the important role partners can play in helping customers to optimise their use of Oracle systems once deployed. Our next Podcast features Caroline Apsey; Technology Evangelist for Oracle who will be discussing Women in Technology.”

The first episode can be found at this link, below…

Apple Podcasts

Soundcloud:

Inoapps provides Scottish Legal Aid Board’s cloud

Posted on June 13, 2018 by - News

indexThe Scottish Legal Aid Board (SLAB) has ‘gone-live’ with Oracle Cloud. The move which, is in line with the Scottish Government’s Digital Strategy for Scotland means that it is the first public body to make this transition.

SLAB is responsible for managing legal aid in Scotland and enables people, who would otherwise be unable to afford it, to get help for their legal problems. Running efficient IT systems is an important element in delivering this successfully.

At SLAB’s Edinburgh HQ, Oracle Platinum Partner Inoapps has now implemented finance (ERP), i-expenses, and procurement in the Cloud, including sourcing and invoice scanning. Following shortly will be Oracle Cloud HCM and Payroll. This will also be the first public sector implementation of Oracle Payroll Cloud in both Scotland and the UK.

John McLeod, Head of Information Systems at SLAB, said: “We chose Inoapps to drive our implementation as it is a proven and award-winning Cloud adopter with a successful track record in delivering multi-pillar Oracle Cloud implementations. What impressed us was the strength of their implementation team, as well as their change management capabilities and the strong alliance with Oracle. There was also a willingness to listen to and interpret our needs in partnership.

“By consolidating financial, HR and payroll processes into one system, we hope to achieve far greater visibility of these activities across the organisation. This, combined with the improved reporting capabilities available in Oracle Cloud, should lead to improved insight and decision-making.”

Graeme Hill, Director of Corporate Services at SLAB, notes: “By embracing cloud technology, we hope to achieve greater system stability and lessen the need for internal specialist expertise.”

Inoapps is experiencing successful expansion across multiple sectors and the consultancy’s credentials in delivering best-in-class Oracle solutions within the public sector continue to develop from strength to strength.

Commenting on the implementation Andrew Norris, Head of Inoapps’ European Business said: “We’re very pleased to add SLAB to our growing list of public sector clients. We understand that, across the board, the sector is under mounting pressure to pursue a Cloud First agenda to streamline processes and achieve cost efficiencies. The nature of our Oracle Cloud solutions and Managed Services is highly transferable across many industries, and together with over a decade’s experience in Oracle and our status as Oracle’s Cloud First Partner of the Year, this has been instrumental in us securing ongoing work within the Public Sector.”

The SLAB implementation started in June 2017 with an initial launch for Finance in the Cloud in December 2017 followed by HR and Payroll being live by the end of September 2018.

Gartner purges half of cloud service providers from Magic Quadrant

Posted on June 1, 2018 by - News

lightning-cloudGartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for infrastructure as a service (IaaS), saw eight cloud service providers dropped from the rankings.

Virtustream, CenturyLink, Joyent, Rackspace, Interoute, Fujitsu, Skytap and NTT were all vanished from the analyst firm’s Magic Quadrant, leaving only the six largest companies.

The number cruncher’s reasons for this sudden purge was that it wanted to create a more “stringent inclusion criteria” this year, which effectively excludes all but global vendors who currently have IaaS and platform as a service (PaaS) offerings.

This means Google, AWS and Microsoft Azure in the leaders’ box, with Alibaba, Oracle and IBM a long way behind.

“These changes reflect Gartner’s belief that customer evaluations are currently primarily focused on vendors for strategic adoption across a broad range of use cases. While customers still search for more focused, scenario-specific providers, these providers should be evaluated in the context of that specific workload, rather than compared in a broader market context”, according to the analyst firm.

 

Oracle creates “self-driving” cloud services

Posted on May 8, 2018 by - News, Products

two-clouds-1385018843_27_contentfullwidthOracle released three more autonomous cloud services which it is calling “self-driving” database and development platforms – which we assume cannot crash into any cyclists on a dark night.

The three new products are Oracle Autonomous Analytics Cloud; Oracle  Autonomous Integration Cloud and Oracle Autonomous Visual Builder Cloud. The trio of products comes two months after Oracle unleashed its Autonomous Data Warehouse

The batch of autonomous services all uses machine learning to provide intelligent patching, upgrading, tuning, and resource scaling, which Oracle sees as a cunning plan to beat Amazon Web Services.

Amit Zavery, executive vice president for Oracle Cloud Platform, told the assembled throngs at a media launch that all three new services “give customers the ability to build applications as well as get analysis inside the data quickly and easily”.

The analytic cloud service provides customers with pre-built models they can use to drive deeper analysis of their data and better optimisations, Zavery said.

The integration cloud service recognises the proliferation of SaaS across the enterprise, and the challenges in connecting diverse platforms and solutions, Zavery said. That product uses machine learning to understand different elements inside an integration flow and quickly connect them. It comes with pre-packaged connectors to products from Salesforce, Workday and SAP, he said.

Oracle’s visual builder service is geared for would-be developers without much, if any, coding skills. The autonomous functionality will make the low-code platform even easier for them to rapidly create and extend desktop and mobile apps, Zavery said.

In June, Oracle is expected to release another significant database offering—the OLTP database—as an independent cloud service.

The company has said by the end of summer customers will see Express and NoSQL autonomous databases, along with a layer of other autonomous services pairing databases with analytics, data management and visualisation tools.

Customers steam about Oracle double billing

Posted on February 26, 2018 by - News

oracleOracle has been accused of double billing big corporate customers under the guise of a software audit.

Oracle is targeting the local subsidiaries of multi-national companies, potentially resulting in firms being double-billed for its offerings, according to the Campaign for Clear Licensing (CCL) the move is an Oracle tactic to catch out subsidiaries since a local entity will be less prepared for an audit than its headquarters.

Many organisations use international Oracle licences for various subsidiaries; this could also result in Oracle double-billing its customers, claimed the campaign.

Martin Thompson, founder of the CCL, and the editor of online community ITAM Review said that this opportunistic activity by Oracle was akin to asking Dad when Mum says no. A robust audit plan in HQ can be undone by “loose lips” in a subsidiary or country office.

“A good software audit risk plan would include a strategy for dealing with such requests, such as deflecting them to headquarters, and solid communications plan to make local teams aware of the risk.”

Thompson said that Oracle was looking around for revenue and non-compliance by people not licensing their products correctly. However, a modern audit is about pre-sales and a way of beginning a dialogue. If they find a shortfall they can then build a solution to resolve that shortfall, he said.

 

Content delivery Cloud market continues to grow

Posted on January 22, 2018 by - News

lightning-cloudTransparency Market Research (TMR) has added up some numbers and divided them by its shoe size and worked out that the global cloud content delivery network market is yet to graduate from its transformational phase.

However, in a report with the punchy title  “Cloud Content Delivery Network Market (Type – Standard/Non-Video CDN and Video CDN; Core Solution – Web Performance Optimization, Media Delivery and Cloud Security; Vertical – Advertising, Media & Entertainment, Online Gaming, E-commerce, Education, Government, Healthcare, BFSI, IT, and Travel & hospitality) – Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast, 2017 – 2025.” , TMR thinks that the market is speeding its way through on the back technological breakthroughs and generous spending by the leading companies.

A title like that for a report surely makes the alphabet groan.

The investment spike will give “thrust” to the market’s transformation, letting traditional providers counter challenges posed by new services. Existing companies in the global cloud content delivery network market are paying more attention to new stuff to bust possibilities of security breaches and efficiently compete in the overall market, the report said.

Partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, and joint ventures have kept prospects bright for the players in the global cloud content delivery network market.

TMR identifies Akamai, Limelight, CenturyLink, CDNetworks, Google, Amazon Web Services, NTT Communications, Alibaba Cloud, Oracle, and Cloudflare as some of the leading players in the business.

The global cloud content delivery network market was pegged at $3,019.6 million by TMR in 2016. Showing a 25.5 percent CAGR, the market will be worth $18,564.5 million by the end of 2025, it estimates. The market is likely to witness “soaring” demand from the media and entertainment segments. Regionally, big vendors will “catapult” North America to the head of the ratpack. Besides this, Asia Pacific is likely to show tremendous growth during the forecast period.

The demand for low-latency and high-quality digital data has increased. The report reckons that the “global society” is increasingly communicating, buying, relaxing, transacting, and learning using the internet, the demand for building efficient cloud content delivery network will rise. As traffic in video streaming grows, quality of services provided will be very important.

“As cloud content delivery networks offer improved quality control, the world will witness a spike in their deployment in the forthcoming years. Other than this, recent advances in the internet network, which have made it agiler will bode well for the market’s prospects. Also, basking in increased broadband speed and exponentially rising downloadable content, the cloud content delivery network market is likely to gain major impetus in the coming years. With organizations migrating their IT services on the cloud, TMR expects the market to gain considerable momentum shortly.”

On the negative side, the global cloud content delivery network market will continue reeling under concerns about data security, the report said.

The market is also likely to face challenges from latency problems.  Whew, the alphabet can relax a bit, now.

 

Oracle sees dark clouds ahead

Posted on December 18, 2017 by - News

lightning-cloudDatabase outfit Oracle has reported a strong second quarter thanks to an increase in cloud revenue, but is not seeing such a bright future.

Second quarter revenues were up six percent to $9.6 billion compared with last year’s second quarter. Net income was up 10 percent to $2.2 billion.

Total cloud revenues were up 44 percent to $1.5 billion but such growth is unlikely to continue, and some analysts are concerned that something is lurking below the surface.

Despite the strength of cloud revenue in the second quarter, Oracle’s cloud growth is forecast to slow in the current quarter to 21 to 25 percent, which is one of the factors that unsettled the market.

Changes are happening within Oracle and its methods of revenue gathering. There has been more take-up of unlimited licence agreements which could be a precursor to cloud migration and BYOL, and has helped slow the new licence revenue decline from 19 percent last year to a flat year and $1.3 billion revenue.

Larry Ellison, Oracle CTO, said the vendor will soon deliver its autonomous “self-driving” database.

“The new artificially intelligent Oracle database is fully automated and requires no human labour for administration. If a security vulnerability is detected, the database immediately patches itself while running.

“No other system can do anything like this. Best of all, we guarantee the price of running the Oracle Autonomous Database in the Oracle Cloud is less than half the cost of running a database in the Amazon Cloud.”

 

 

NetSuite wants more ISVs

Posted on October 17, 2017 by - News

photoNetSuite has said that it wants to work with more ISVs and is continuing to recruit more UK partners.

The Oracle-owned outfit is a more attractive prospect for channel players looking to sell more business intelligence tools and services.

NetSuite is recruiting resellers across EMEA as well as bringing on board a larger number of ISVs.

It will be expanding its SuiteCloud Developer Network (SDN) programme to extend the programme across more countries in EMEA  before becoming a global initiative.

The vendor makes SuiteApps which are add-ons for developers to target verticals or compliance requirements in individual countries.

ISVs themselves can also contribute their own apps to help support expansion into specific market areas.

Alongside that initiative the firm has also reported that it is continuing to add new partners in the UK to help service customer demand for ERP solutions.

Oracle’s Hurd predicts huge cyber-attacks

Posted on October 3, 2017 by - News

oracleOracle CEO Mark Hurd told the assembled throngs at OpenWorld that is becoming an essential resource for customers looking to cut costs and reduce risk.

He warned that the business community hasn’t seen a truly shocking cyberattack just yet. But it certainly will.

“I’m telling you, the next event might be bigger than you think”,  he said. “This thing is going to get more serious, not less serious.”

Oracle wants companies to offload software administration duties onto its cloud.

That’s a facet of a multitude of new products, from an autonomous database to a blockchain service to upgrades across dozens of Software-as-a-Service applications.

Hurd said need cloud providers to cut their IT budgets and take the operational load off their staff, especially when it comes to security problems.

While digital transformation is expected, IT budgets are not increasing, and almost every security upgrade motivated by a high-profile intrusion cuts into the customer’s innovation spend, Hurd said.

 

Oracle announces 1,000 new sales jobs

Posted on July 18, 2017 by - News

oracleOracle has announced 1,000 new jobs in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Under the ‘Change Happens Here’ banner the company is hunting for sales representatives to support its Cloud computing business.

The move comes on the back of the company recently posting record financial results with total cloud revenue up 58 percent.

Oracle claims it is the fastest growing scaled cloud company and thinks its cloud business will accelerate into hyper-growth in the current year.

Oracle wants to recruit candidates with a strong sense of personal drive and the ability to successfully sell some of the world’s most exciting  cloud technologies.

Candidates can apply immediately for a range of positions throughout EMEA, by visiting the ‘Change Happens Here’ page – oracle.com/experience. Oracle is looking for graduate level candidates who have a genuine interest in technology and the passion for the transformation cloud computing can bring to enterprises.

Tino Scholman, VP of Oracle Cloud in the EMEA region, said: “Our cloud business is growing at incredible rates, so now is the right time to bring in a new generation of talent to our company. We are looking to hire relationship focused people who are self-motivated and smart, who thrive for business transformation for our customers and love delivering great results. Diversity is one of the cornerstones of the unique Oracle culture. We want to offer 1,000 talented individuals the opportunity to change their career for the better, to access the best possible training and development, as well as the chance to accelerate their career within the fastest growing Cloud company at the centre of a generational shift to digital enablement.”

Oracle predicts half of businesses will be cloud based

Posted on June 27, 2017 by - News

Oracle-Announces-X5Oracle thinks that nearly half of companies plan to run their business on cloud infrastructure within three years

James Stanbridge, Vice President Iaas Product Management at Oracle said businesses were rapidly embracing cloud infrastructure (IaaS) to boost performance and innovation levels, new research from Oracle has revealed. While negative perceptions around security, complexity and loss of control still present barriers to adoption, they are shown to be outdated myths, with those that have moved to IaaS proving the reality is far more positive.

Two thirds of businesses that are already using IaaS to some extent, say it makes it easier to innovate. The same proportion says moving to IaaS has significantly cut their time to deploy new applications or services. Furthermore, 64 percent say IaaS has significantly cut on-going maintenance costs and 59 percent of all respondents believe businesses not investing in IaaS will increasingly find themselves struggling to keep pace with businesses that are.

The research also found that experienced users are almost twice as likely to believe IaaS can provide world class operational performance in terms of availability, uptime and speed, compared to non-adopters. Although some fear the move to IaaS may be complicated, 64 percent of experienced IaaS users say the move was easier than they expected.

Most respondents agree IaaS will have a role to play in their business within three years, with 44 percent saying they will run most – or all of their business IT infrastructure on IaaS. Only 10 percent of respondents believe IaaS will still have little or no role in their business in three years.

Stanbridge said: “When it comes to cloud adoption there has always been a case of perception lagging behind reality. Cloud is still relatively new to a lot of businesses and some outdated perceptions persist. We are now seeing high levels of success and satisfaction from businesses that are saving money, cutting complexity and driving exciting innovation thanks to cloud infrastructure. Those resisting the move need to challenge the perceptions holding them back because the longer they wait, the further ahead their competitors will pull.”

Ellison bets on IaaS and PaaS business

Posted on June 23, 2017 by - News

Larry EllisonOracle founder Larry Ellison has told the world that he expects Oracle’s IaaS and PaaS business to “accelerate into hyper-growth” over the coming year.

Strong SaaS sales dramatically improved the company’s fiscal in the fourth quarter and full-year 2017 results.

SaaS sales grew 76 percent to $1 billion in the fourth quarter pushing Oracle’s overall cloud revenues up 66 percent $1.4 billion. Total revenues for the quarter rose four percent to $10.9 billion.

Although IaaS and PaaS growth was 45 percent in the fourth quarter, rising to $403 million, Ellison predicted Oracle’s IaaS and PaaS business will soon grow so fast it will “be even bigger than our SaaS business”.

He said that during the new fiscal year, Oracle’s PaaS and IaaS businesses to accelerate into hyper growth, the same kind of growth it was seeing with SaaS.

Ellison, who is now Oracle’s CTO, also used the call to make his ritual traditional jibe at Salesforce, claiming fiscal 2017 was the second year in a row Oracle sold more cloud annual recurring revenue than its SaaS rival.

He said that Oracle’s rapid SaaS growth was the driving force behind Oracle’s revenue and earnings growth in Q4.

“The reason we are confident that we will pass Salesforce is because we have a three-fold SaaS application suites for ERP, for HCM and for CRM including financials, procurement, supply chain, manufacturing, human resources, payroll, marketing, sales and service. Salesforce in contrast only competes in three of these nine market areas,” he said.

Amazon wrestles Oracle in handbags at dawn duel

Posted on April 21, 2017 by - News

cda0b487bcbf9c72a65ee8106e695603While you would not really expect Amazon and Oracle to see eye to eye, it appears that the two are having a very public hand-bags at dawn duel.

Two months ago Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd called Amazon’s cloud infrastructure “old” and claimed his company was gaining market share.

Now Amazon Web Services chief Andy Jassy slammed Oracle for locking customers into painfully long and expensive contracts.

“People are very sensitive about being locked in given the experience they’ve had the last 10 to 15 years,” Jassy told Amazon’s AWS Summit in San Francisco.

“When you look at cloud, it’s nothing like being locked into Oracle.” Jassy was addressing a cultural shift in the way technology is bought and sold. No longer does the process involve the purchase of heavy proprietary software with multi-year contracts that include annual maintenance fees.”

Jassy claims that the cloud is about choice and ease of use, including letting clients turn things off if they’re not working.

Oracle investigating buying Accenture

Posted on March 30, 2017 by - Gossip, News

oracleThe dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured a hell on earth yarn which claims that data base maker Oracle wants to write a cheque for the government outsourcer Accenture.

The database giant has hired a team of consultants to conduct due diligence to “explore the synergies that could be created if they [Oracle] bought Accenture”.

Oracle’s money men and women are weighing up the pros and cons including the potential impact on Oracle’s wider channel.

While this sort of thing happens all the time, Oracle is rather serious about it even if it is a little bit daring. Accenture has a market cap of $77.5 billion, and shareholders will expect a premium offer so it is set to cost a bomb.

It would dwarf some of Oracle’s biggest deals so far which have included a $10 billion buy of PeopleSoft, a $7.4 billion deal for Sun Microsystems, and $9.3 billion for Netsuite.

Still it would give Oracle some rather huge government-based customers to hold by their ankles and shake until the money comes out.

Oracle dumps Solaris 12 for a cloudy future

Posted on January 20, 2017 by - News, Products

oracle_sparc_solaris_roadmapIt would appear that Donald (Prince of Orange) Trump’s favourite database maker has dumped Solaris 12 from its roadmap as part of its cloud initiatives.

Oracle published a new roadmap and Solaris 12 is absent. A new blueprint dated January 13, 2017 expunges any mention Solaris 12 in the places where Oracle had included it in the 2014 edition. There is a mention of “Solaris 11.next” as due to debut during this year or the next complete with “Cloud Deployment & Integration Enhancements”.

You can’t find any mention of “Solaris 11.next” anywhere on the worldwide wibble.

Oracle does mention SPARC Next appearing this year in 2020 SPARC Next+. It also hints of plans to launch SPARC infrastructure-as-a-service, probably under the brand “@Customer” with services in “Dedicated Metered & Non-Metered” form.

It appears that there will not be a full new version of SPARC but the existing flavour will be enhanced and will be supported for many years to come.

While it is not the end of Solaris which some have predicted, it does seem to indicate that Oracle has not much will to push through a full version.