Oracle has used the spotlight of its OpenWorld conference to launch a flurry of new offerings, many of which focus on incorporating mobile and big data analytics for application development.
The “brand new, majorly upgraded platform-as-a-service,” in the words of Larry Ellison, now chairman and CTO of the company, focuses on integrating mobile, social, and big data capabilities.
Ellison said that in its platform focus, Oracle wanted to make it is easy to move existing Oracle databases and applications to the cloud. At the same time, he added, “it wasn’t sufficient simply to move off-premise and into the cloud. There had to be, obviously, a bunch of benefits associated with that.”
Ellison said Oracle designed the platform so it would “not only move [databases and applications] with the push of a button, but modernize it — as much as we could, without you having to change a single line of code.”
The new platform integrates social features such as collaboration and the ability to form groups, so it’s easy to incorporate those aspects into applications built on the platform, Ellison said. Mobile is another key aspect of application building, he added.
“It’s impossible, when you build on top of our platform, not to provide mobile interfaces,” Ellison said, so any application can run on tablets or smartphones regardless of operating system. Big data analytics is another feature that is an integral part of the underlying platform, he added, so it is also incorporated into applications built on top.
In all, Oracle added half a dozen new platform services to its cloud platform offerings, including a big data cloud platform, mobile cloud, integration services, cloud-based business processes and two solutions for Java.
Oracle’s other announcements from this week on mobile, big data cloud include:
- 14 mobile applications for its E-business Suite including mobile time cards, expense recording and approvals, inventory information and field service. These are available for iOS devices and planned for Android.
- A new user interface (UI) for mobile and Web-based applications, its Alta UI, which the company called “designed for mobile first.”
- An offering designed to enable nontechnical employees to build mobile applications. The Mobile Application Accelerator “allows users with no coding experience to rapidly and intuitively produce mobile applications without coding.” The apps will be able to run on both Android and iOS smartphones and tablets through Oracle’s mobile app framework and its Mobile Cloud.
- New database in-memory software to allow faster data processing and access to more current, accurate data analysis.
- New cloud-based big data analytics capabilities for business intelligence.
- Improved security for Oracle mobile applications, through closer integration between its mobile app offerings and its security offerings.
Image from Oracle
