Last week we attended an Oracle event for EMEA analysts, arranged in conjunction with its inaugural Cloud World user conference in Dubai. For the conference series (and the analyst event), Oracle highlights four themes for transformation and growth:

• Cloud
• Mobile
• Social
• Big Data

No surprises in that list. For all four, our assessment is that Oracle acknowledges “we all know these are the important tech themes, we reckon we’re ahead of the game, but yes there’s still a long way to go.”

Looking at each of these in turn, we can draw up a short, informal “school-report card” around its current position and direction, based on Oracle’s current capability and our assessment of its strategy in terms of market relevance and its likelihood of success:

Cloud: Oracle’s claims to cloud leadership are credible in many ways; for instance, its acquisitions (eg RightNow, Taleo) and its Fusion apps being available on cloud give it a strong position in SaaS – though there’s a long way to go in roadmaps, pricing, integration and deployment.  Its Java Services PaaS offering is nascent but we think it will become an important player here. Its IaaS offering, however, (announced coincident with the conference) is purely a private cloud offering: this has led it to be somewhat dismissed in some quarters, but we think this will appeal to a significant number of large companies who want the security of in-house systems but the financial advantages of Cloud – banks for instance. Verdict: Shaping up well

Mobile: Oracle’s story on mobile-enabled apps has not developed as quickly as the market might have hoped, although its capabilities are actually stronger than might be thought (an unusual example of Oracle underplaying its strengths); however we are promised that this year will see some significant announcements in the mobile arena. Verdict: Has ability, could do better, needs to work at this over the coming months

Social: at the present time, Oracle’s efforts in social are somewhat spotty: its efforts to build a social business platform based on Fusion are still under development, but it has already developed and launched Webcenter. But on the other hand, it has made some smart acquisitions in the area of (public) social network analysis and exploitation – most notably Vitrue for social marketing. And, it has taken a leadership position in promoting customer experience management as a fuller expression of CRM, adding a raft of tools in e-commerce and analytics such as ATG, Fatwire and Endeca to its CRM offerings. Verdict: Has done some good work, needs to maintain this standard throughout

Big Data: this is a fairly nascent area for all supplier companies, and the most advanced Big Data implementations are home-grown, mainly in the big Internet companies. So while Oracle’s Big Data efforts are still fairly rudimentary, it is not behind the market. Its main thrust today is to persuade people that its Engineered Systems meet most of today’s Big Data needs, potentially augmented by links to NoSQL databases like Hadoop. We also think however that few organizations are yet ready for more than Oracle can give them, nor are other providers clearly ahead. Verdict: shows promise

Footnote: Oracle in the Middle East

Oracle began its Cloud World series in Dubai, an interesting choice. Speaking with its customers there, we were struck by (1) how much more positive was the business climate and outlook than in Europe and (2) what a strong position Oracle has built in the region. Dubai can be seen as the business gateway to North Africa as well as a good place to base middle-Eastern operations – we could easily understand why Oracle wanted to locate its very first Cloud World conference there.