Oracle: Big Business Has Big Data Woes - NYTimes.com

Here?s a preview of what Oracle will be saying at its big annual show, Oracle OpenWorld, which begins Sunday:

Business, the way you?re working will kill you. Storage costs, social media awareness, software application migration ? they are all big problems. And, not surprisingly, Oracle is trying to address them.

Last week I sat down with Mark V. Hurd, Oracle?s co-president, for a talk about Oracle?s strategy. Most of his conversation had to do with the problems facing big companies as they adapt to a world of mobile devices, cloud computing and huge amounts of data.

?Customers are growing their data storage by 35 percent to 40 percent a year,? Mr. Hurd said. He also said that this figure is only likely to rise with an increasing number of data-collecting sensors and captured Web clicks. ?They are paying $9,000 a terabyte to store it. Now, we have big customers sitting on 80, 90, 100 petabytes of storage. Even with good discounts, they are paying $300 million a year just to store data.?

The next issue, he said, was gathering insights about customers from all that data. ?Only 38 percent of big brands can connect with their customers via mobile devices,? he said. ?The ones that can have a meaningful dialogue are about 10 percent. To actually transact business in an enjoyable way, that?s about 3 percent.?

Mr. Hurd made these points to underline the importance of new data storage technologies, like the one Oracle is offering, which, he said, would shrink data storage by close to 90 percent. And once the data is stored, Oracle?s analysis software will be deployed to improve how businesses find and interact with customers, he said.

He also managed a couple of digs at the competition. (Hey, it wouldn?t be Oracle without that, right?) ?SAP has not written a line of code for cloud computing; they?ve just purchased companies,? he said. ?We?ve spent seven years on it.?

That was similar to the argumentmade last June by Larry Ellison, Oracle?s chief executive, when he showed off Oracle?s suite of cloud-based applications. Despite the seven years of work, however, few of those applications were available then. Expect an update at the show.

Another issue for businesses, Mr. Hurd said, is software application modernization. ?The majority of applications in the world aren?t from Microsoft or Oracle,? he said, ?They?re homegrown.? This is an issue as well when customers modify Oracle applications to suit their individual needs. The homegrown and tweaked applications must now be adapted to an online, interactive world, and Oracle will be spending a lot of time with engineers on making this work.

Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/mark-hurd-big-business-has-big-data-woes/

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