Data as a Service = intelligence on-demand

Oracle’s Data as a Service (DaaS) solution (already unofficially dubbed Oracle Data Cloud) could be a key differentiator for a wide range of organisations, but will be of particular advantage to smaller businesses, giving them more business intelligence breadth than larger rivals.

DaaS exploits both the data platform gained through Oracle’s acquisition of BlueKai, earlier in 2014, and its recently announced Oracle Big Data SQL. The BlueKai Audience Data Marketplace is a highly regarded tool for personalising marketing campaigns. Oracle Big Data SQL, announced last week at the Interact 2014 Summit provides a single tool query across Oracle Database, Hadoop and NoSQL.

Intended to be linked into other Oracle applications, DaaS not only supplements, but fills in the gaps in organisation’s business intelligence, by using Oracle’s cloud to pull and cleanse information from publically available sources, to give ‘trustworthy’ and ‘transparent’ information. Basically it is using Oracle’s cloud services as an intelligence function, and is of course most immediately relevant to organisations with an existing Oracle infrastructure, whether on-premise on cloud.

Available by subscription, there are two initial flavours of DaaS. The first, Oracle DaaS for Marketing, which brings in a reported one billion profiles and information from 300 Oracle partners, is available now. The second, Oracle DaaS for Social, reportedly gathers information from in excess of 700 million social messages and items of news data collected from 40 million sites including Facebook and Twitter, but is only available on application to Oracle.

DaaS for Marketing and Social are certainly the ‘low-hanging fruit’ from the BlueKai acquisition. However, the potential of DaaS in other areas where Oracle is a major player, such as Sales and Recruitment applications, to speed process and reduce risk will be of significant benefit to those enterprises already on an Oracle infrastructure. 

Oracle DaaS goes up against IBM’s Watson Content Cloud and services provided by the likes of Experian, I expect other providers to follow suit.

However, here’s a thought; Oracle could ‘steal a march’ on its rivals by giving DaaS integration into its rivals enterprise platforms. After all, organisations, which often have multiple enterprise systems will not want multiple ‘trustworthy’ and ‘transparent’ ‘Data Clouds’.