Speaking at the Oracle Open World conference, held recently in San Francisco, chairman and CTO Larry Ellison described the move to the cloud as a generational change, the like of which has not been seen since the advent of the personal computer. Ellison believes that most all software will be cloud based in ten years or so. Oracle started work a decade ago with a rewrite of all its applications in the Fusion project. Oracle’s cloud credentials contrast with those of its main competitors. According to Ellison ‘The words largest ERP company has nothing in the cloud, nor does IBM. We never see them!’ Ellison’s address concluded with a plea for next generation security. ‘We are losing too many cyber battles – although not yet the war.’ Security should always be as low in the stack as possible, ‘An encrypted database is more secure than apps that encrypt.’
In her presentation on JD Edwards’ vision for asset-intensive industries including oil and gas, Louise Farner described the challenge facing these verticals as more and more nations enter the ‘super-aged’ category where more than 20% of the population is over 65. By 2030, all of Western Europe and North America will be ‘super-aged’ according to the UN, making the aging workforce a structural problem. Technology and automation is set to plug the gap, in particular the internet of things where a new internet of things orchestrator is used to connect smart devices, sensors and RFID tags to enable ‘pre-emptive maintenance.’ The Java-based infrastructure adds enterprise-level security to raw sensor data and provides a rules-engine designer to feed conditioned data into any JDE EnterpriseOne application – running naturellement in the cloud.
The JDE unit is also working on a management of change solution that embeds the OSHA 29 CFR 1910.119 standard for process industries in a ‘broad solution’ for HSE audit and inspections and more. Other ongoing research targets integration of ‘wearables’ to support proximity based tracking and transactions, vocal query of enterprise information and delivering hands-free guidance in ‘high cognitive overload situations.’
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