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’.

"My precious" - why IT/IM should not be like Gollum

(c) MGM 212

With the impending realse of the film version of Tolkien's The Hobbit in the UK, I was reminded of the character Gollum's attitude to the One Ring. He described it as "my precious" despite the fact it had distorted his mind and was gardually killing him. Whilst such an attitude to something you possess and control is a bit extreme, many CIOs, CTOs and even CFOs, take the same view of their information management/IT provision. 

I am the first to champion the call that information is an organisation's most important asset, but that does not mean I agree that the organisation is always the best to manage and explot that asset.

I keep my money in a bank, I pay my local mechanic to service my car, so why, if I were still a CIO/CTO, would I have issues about asking better resouced, focussed and trained professionals to provide my information management/IT capability?

There are 9 questions/myths about managed services/outsourcing and cloud provision that I regularly have to address - and burst.

Gollum didn't have a happy end in Lord of the Rings. Neither will CIOs/CTOs who do not prioritise delivery over (percieved) control.

Cloud-in-a-box? Why wouldn’t you?

Interesting briefing this morning with the UK arm of technology solutions provider Avnet and HP. It was around a product labelled ‘Cloud-in-a-box’, whose purpose is to give organisations the capability to cost effectively develop and test applications in a controlled environment.

Given current economic constraints, we have demands for faster development and roll-out of enterprise applications which are ‘right first time’. This combined with the increasingly pervasive nature of internet accessibility, and the devices that can be used, means that cloud deployment is becoming the implementation route of choice for organisations of all sizes and complexions.

But rapid/agile development always comes with a level of risk, not least in that test environments are often ‘second-hand’ servers, ‘under the desk’ with limited controls, measurement or management. This situation frequently arises because putting together a business case for a controlled IT test environment can be quite nebulous.

 

The CIAB proposition is for Avnet, through it's partner network, to deliver a preconfigured HP BladeSystem Matrix, with appropriate RAM, discs, a network switch, and HP’s Quality Center test management tools for measurement and quality assurance. All provided on a subscription model, avoiding the capex issue.

As a former IT director, who ‘knew’ that many of his developers, and even network managers, were trying to, (and had to), develop production ready applications on ‘under the desk’ equipment, the concept of the Avnet and HP CIAB is a no-brainer.

 

I will be writing in more detail about the appliance in the next week, however I would recommend those current and potential Avnet partners, whose interest I have raised, to attend Avnet’s webinar on 28 November bit.ly/RNbUsm