On Thursday, February 12, the MIT Enterprise Forum of Atlanta originated a studio broadcast program entitled “Exploring the Future of Enterprise Software” from the facilities of Georgia Public Broadcasting. The panel was headlined by Charles Phillips, the President of Oracle Corporation and included Eran Gill, co-founder of Cloud Sherpas, Matt Trevathan, an IBM Master Inventor and Senior Solutions Architect, and Matthew Drooker, VP of System Architecture of Turner Broadcasting System.
You can view the entire program on the Forum website, so I will give my observations from the packed gallery at this event. Mr. Phillips has been at Oracle since 2003 and comes from an investment banking background with a law degree and military service on his resume. I wondered why he was chosen for this heavy operating position until he described the number and pace of acquisitions Oracle has made during his tenure. He took the obligatory jab at Microsoft by making it clear that Oracle is “not chasing Google or making XBoxes.” His company does, however, appear to be buying up all the elements of the “enterprise stack” from the database underpinnings to the top level of applications. I suppose any entrepreneur with an enterprise software plan should list Oracle as a potential exit strategy.
Oracle’s internal systems for managing and supporting its far flung network of employees and users have considerable social networking elements. The goal is to be able to “find the expert” on any particular technical issue, wherever that person may be. Here was another good example of monetizing Web 2.0 principles inside a large corporation.
Mr. Travathan clearly had the coolest title: “Master Inventor.” That ranks right up there with “Futurist.” I’m not sure where one goes to school to train for such careers. Mr. Gil is on the front-lines of cloud computing and brought useful insights from that perspective. Mr. Drooker was the potential customer for the rest of the panelists and was able to talk about Turner’s product development both for its cable MSO’s and its Websites direct to consumer. He’s the one helping generate the explosion of video data that is driving much of what was discussed in the program.
The panelists had a lively discussion touching on such themes such as these:
- Hardware the commodity versus value in the applications
- Grid computing versus cloud computing
- Cloud now practical because its economics have become favorable
- The hierarchy of infrastructure, platform, SaaS, and “Security as a Service”
- (Travathan threw in them term “Platform as a Service’ that IBM is developing with Google)
Some of the more interesting issues raised:
- Lack of standards in the cloud — Can you get you data back if your vendor “evaporates” (sorry couldn’t help that) or can you move to another cloud
- Internal clouds — utilizing otherwise untapped resources in some part of your mega company
- Selling back into the market excess storage or computing power, similar to the way some companies sell electric power back to utilities
- Security and privacy — with one observation that financial services companies are unlikely ever to let their data get out of house
For those of us working in capital light startups and relative smaller ventures, it was indeed interesting to hear this expert panel talk about the issues they wrestle with on a daily basis.
