This past Tuesday, I heard Aaron Cornfeld kick off Oracle Day.  Aaron is the VP of Solution Specialists at Oracle and he works predominately with Oracle’s Public Cloud.  He led off looking at innovation and ways to put innovation in practice.

Everyone is looking for big ideas, ways to transform your businesses.  It’s not enough to just keep the lights on anymore.  Hospitals are using big data, banks are using mobile to replace branches, and power companies are using new ways to reach customers.  The strategic advantage is the ability to see how customers buying habits are changing and adapt.  Everyone’s job to transform

Five Areas of Transformation:

  • Social
  • Cloud
  • Big Data
  • Mobile
  • Internet of Things – Connecting everything, 9 billion connected devices going to 15 billion

Role of IT in Innovation

Is your IT a complex barrier with lots of old legacy systems?  If you can simplify IT, you can eliminate the boat anchors that hold you back.  There are two possible approaches.

1. Take an entrepreneurial approach. Set up a parallel infrastructure that can move forward.

2. Take a pragmatic approach. What are the incremental changes that we can make to transform?

 

As an example, the Federal Government is the stagiest IT system with systems in place for the last 25 to 40 years.  Many of those systems are obsolete and being maintained by people who are close to retirement.  Just think of the cost savings when those old systems can be replaced.  For IT to survive in the next generation, it must embrace continuous improvement and get away from doing

  • Integration
  • Optimization
  • Maintenance

 

Oracle’s solution is the integrated technology stack, a comprehensive solution that fuses all of the Engineered Systems together.   This allows IT shops to moving forward as an Agile, shorter-cycle software company.  Think of IT as a bridge, not a barrier.

My biggest example would be U.S. Border Security, but I’m proudest of my smallest implementations.  For example, a county in Colorado with only 2 people doing IT.

With an engineered solution, you know that the versions are certified to work together.  Not everything but quite a bit – from the OS to the processor to the storage units.  That way, you can rest assured that the pieces of the stack work together.  And the more you buy, the better it integrates.

 

Oracle Strategy

  1. Engineered to work together
  2. Best in class – Make them open so they interoperate
  3. Cloud – Most broad and deep cloud, by passing the complexity of setting it up yourself
  4. Specialized Solutions Tailored around Different Industries

 

Case Studies

University of Pittsburgh Medical Center  (UPMC)

At UPMC, they wanted to treat every patient in a personalized way or tell where a new viral breakout was likely to happen.

Big Data + Big Science = Better Solutions and Outcomes

They built a brand new center that specialized in new outcomes.  In the old system, they had over 100 legacy systems managing 3.2 petabytes of data.  Now, they have a consolidation solution centered around using

  • Oracle Health Sciences
  • Oracle Fusion Middleware
  • Oracle Exadata

 

They are only 1 year into a 5 year journey but they are already achieving better outcomes while reducing costs and improving service.

 

Argos Energy

When 8 million lost power after Hurricane Sandy, this power company sent crews to quickly restore service.

Company store center serves as a hub. Before modern management systems, they used rough estimates for power restoration. Now, they always know the status of their network. Instead of guessing where the outage is, sensors in the lines pinpoint the breaks. They can give more accurate restoral times, can give social notifications, can share their resources better, and put them on the path to introducing a smart grid.

 

British Telecom

Have to think about where the demand will be years ahead of time.  First time that the Olympics had Wi-Fi in all of the stadiums.  Upgraded their Enterprise Service Bus so they could handle 4 times the normal traffic. Getting it right the first time is British Telecom’s motto.  BT wanted to empower their agents to handle a wide-range of products instead of transferring the calls to different areas.

Implemented

  • Oracle Real Time Decisions – Used predictive analytics to predict responses
  • Oracle Service Cloud
  • Oracle Solaris