The Hindu Business Line : Oracle to focus on four key areas

MOVING to open standards that give customers "choices" and letting applications that use middleware from different companies talk to each other will keep the entire tech industry on its toes, says Mr Larry Ellison, Chief Executive Officer, Oracle Corporation.

Oracle's recent partnership with IBM's Websphere middleware stack could be the beginning of a new trend in the industry, he said.

In a keynote presentation at the Oracle OpenWorld, 2005, reflecting the maturing of the software industry, Mr Ellison outlined four key areas that he will focus on at Oracle over the next 24 months — security, business intelligence, industry functionality and automation.

Highlighting that security risks are increasing for the entire industry with more applications being hosted on the Internet, the need to encrypt and create a "fail-safe back-up system" will be priority.

Giving the example of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), he said as telecom carriers switch from a circuit switched (or voice-based) to a packet switched environment — Internet, "malicious persons can put down not only the data, but also your voice networks."

Business intelligence and process automation, which he says have remained in separate worlds until now, have got to change in the future.

Since BI is designed to "alter behaviour and adapt behaviour accordingly, it has to be integrated with process automation in every respect.

Citing an example from the enterprise database industry, Mr Ellison said if service requests are going up faster than sales, it may not be a good thing, something which senior executives will like to know as early as possible.

Another key focus area will be developing deep industry functionality, which need not necessarily be linked to "core business" of companies, he said.

The special algorithms that are being created for clinical trials in the pharma industry or the bunch of components in the middleware arena are some examples of this trend.

Finally, pushing for automation, he said that the primary benefit would be less chance of errors and thereby faster and reliable access to information.

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