Oracle EVP: Moving to SaaS world has been 'a subtle change'

SAN FRANCISCO -- The addition of Infrastructure-as-a-Service was one of the big introductions to the Oracle Cloud earlier this week, but the hardware giant's improvements around Software-as-a-Service have been getting a big push at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 too.

The Oracle Cloud itself was in development for six years before it was unveiled back in June, so it shouldn't come as a surprise when Steve Miranda, executive vice president of applications development at Oracle, explained during a Q&A session on Wednesday morning that moving to a "SaaS world has been a subtle change" for the global corporation.

Thus, one of the areas where Oracle has been facing some criticism is speed -- at least in terms of delivering these solutions to the market.

"I realize we're judged on a different measure, and that's good that we are because we're big," admitted Miranda.

Nevertheless, when talking about speed of implementation, Miranda asserted that Oracle is "happy where we are, but we're going to speed that up" when it comes to specific tasks such as improving data conversions for customers.

One example of that could be seen around social. Miranda explained that with the addition of social features to the SaaS stack and the debut of Oracle's Social Relationship Management platform, Oracle is seeing a lot of activity around customers who sell to consumer industries but sell through a reseller.

Miranda continued that they are trying to get closer to the customer trends through social, which has evolved into two reactions: either react quickly on the service side (to generate sales) or the marketing side (to generate leads). 

However, picking out those trends from the data is still easier said than done. Miranda acknowledged by arguing that when you get into complex planning algorithms and other things you still can't do today because of capacity and volume, the ability to quickly bring in lots of data (usually social-related) from external systems to make real-time decisions is still very difficult.

Miranda concluded, "My opinion is the killer app has yet to be done."

More coverage from Oracle OpenWorld 2012 on ZDNet:

• Oracle's Hurd holds court: A read between the lines
• Oracle's Hurd outlines 'holistic' strategy: Will CIOs bite?
• Oracle expands cloud services; unveils world's 'first' multi-tenant database
• Oracle unveils public cloud partner programs
• Ellison sets sights on an all-Oracle cloud
• Oracle execs point toward integration across select enterprise apps
• Oracle's seven pillars of cloud put SaaS at the core
• Oracle & the enterprise carousel
• Will customers forget vendor lock-in concerns for Oracle?
• Amazon spins up free Oracle database cloud
• Oracle serves up bite-size Exadata system for SMEs
• Oracle OpenWorld 2012: By the numbers
• Oracle's Kurian: 'Vast majority' of enterprise customers use hybrid cloud models