by Glenn Le Santo live from Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona
Oracle is one of the world’s old school technology businesses, formed long before the era of Facebook and Google.
They come from a time when, along with companies like IBM, they ruled the roost. But just because they have been around a while don’t be fooled into thinking they are behind the times. Oracle is a forward looking company with products and services that sit at the very core of today’s business and technology.
I visited their stand at the Mobile World Conference for a chat about cloud computing with Brian Kracik, Director of Industry Marketing at Oracle’s Communications Global Business Unit.
Brian told me that Oracle are focussing on cloud computing and cloud enablement. Oracle are leveraging technology to allow operators to become cloud providers. They are a B2B player so the man in the street is probably unaware of Oracle and their services. This doesn’t worry Oracle as their focus is to provide services to their partners rather than direct to the end users. The Unified Communications Suite is a good example of this. The product is designed to bring convergence to our data by joining up our disparate devices and data sources in the cloud. Doing so enables the end user to find and utilise their data from anywhere with a data connection on any device. It’s a solution to a perennial problem faced by people who work from multiple sites, travel often and use several connected devices.
I was given a demonstration of the suite and was impressed by the way it brought various streams of data, contact and interaction into one easy to use dashboard. It even aggregates your social streams so you don’t have to flit around between LinkedIn, facebook and twitter. Other neat tricks include the ability to graphically display attachments received in your mailbox. Filters help you to quickly find what you need, a very attractive proposition to anyone who has spent hours trying to find that elusive but vital attachment. Clever functionality enables you to simply click the attachment’s icon to reattach it to another mail for forwarding. It all looked intuitive and user friendly, vital ingredients in getting the mix right if you want happy users. The Unified Communications Suite can be skinned and customised by the customer, who is likely to be a telco or ISP, as well as by the end user.
Products like the Unified Communications Suite are among many solutions Oracle provides to operators in an effort to help them attract and retain customs. They are working hard to improve and develop the end user experience – with a focus on convergence and collaboration. Perhaps this is why they deliver what they claim is the number one platform for service providers around the world.
Oracle champion open source. Their business model is based on open and portable platforms with Java at the core. It’s the opposite of some other companies models that try to lock you permanently into their systems, making it very difficult for you to escape. This alone deserves our applause, as does the quality and reliability of their offerings.
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