At a recent customer conference in London, US-based Oracle executives gave accounts of the supplier\u2019s cloud business as becoming at once more enterprise and more mid-market.<\/b>
Oracle\u2019s declaration of a march to the cloud will have escaped nobody in the IT market. The supplier started 2017 at a cloud event in New York, with reports of a new wave of customer take-up of its cloud offerings , and the announcement of some new datacentres to support its cloud push.
At a recent customer conference in London, \u201cModern Business Experience\u201d, Oracle executives briefed Computer Weekly on how they believe the company\u2019s cloud business is shaping up. They presented a picture of the supplier\u2019s cloud delivery becoming at once more comprehensive, with corporate IT being re-enlisted as a stakeholder alongside lines of business, and more inclusive of small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Laura Ipsen, general manager and senior vice-president of Oracle Marketing Cloud, has a CV that includes senior executive roles at Microsoft, in its worldwide public sector organisation. She has also worked for Cisco, as general manager of its Connected Energy Networks business, as well as at Oracle.
She is six months into her current position, leading the supplier\u2019s marketing cloud business, which includes marketing automation system Eloqua, and is mainly pitched at chief marketing officers. However, she said corporate IT is coming into the picture more now that cloud-delivered marketing software is maturing beyond the putting in point systems at a departmental level.
\u201cCorporate IT is important, alongside the marketers, because while the latter are wielding massive budgets \u2013 oftentimes more than the CIO \u2013 the expectation of RoI [return on investment] is very high, and marketers have woken up to not having enough IT budget to do what they want to do,\u201d said Ipsen.
\u201cThey need to work hand in hand with IT. There was a time, about three years ago, when marketers were saying: \u2018you go your way, I\u2019ll go mine\u2019. But data privacy, scalability, difficulties in implementation, integrations, and so on mean that is not realistic. We find that the companies that are furthest along do have that partnership.
\u201cIt is partly about de-risking the projects. But it is not just about security and privacy, it\u2019s about business context and value, and the CIOs are aware of that too,\u201d she said.
Ipsen gave the example of Vodafone\u2019s implementation of Eloqua in 20 countries. \u201cThat requires IT support. My dream customer would be an implementer of Marketing Cloud, doing the whole stack and connecting to ERP and HCM \u2013 especially with respect to predictive analytics.\u201d<\/p>\n