Is Oracle the Missing Link of the Smart City / Big Data Wave?

OK. Oracle has a comprehensive Smart City offering within their broad Public Sector solution catalog. I will get to that point. First, I need to write a proper introduction to the article.

While exploring different municipalities road to becoming Smart Cities, I came across Oracle solutions running mission critical systems as a common denominator. Both on explore / discovery interactions and during project related interactions, Oracle presence was almost ubiquitous at the core of the cities in many levels. I came to compare with corporate world where Oracle is quite often a synonym for Mission Critical systems.

During the course of the last 2 years I had followed Oracle movement towards the Cloud. Many correct investments and acquisitions, and the alignment of their services and solutions with a Cloud centered speech. Difficult not to put both topics together and have a strong confidence on the potential of the company to offer smooth transition to the Cloud to their massive client base, given the trust factor and potentially as little concern as another version update.

According to their Website, Oracle offers "Solutions for National and Local Government. As you modernize operations and enhance services, Oracle's complete solutions enable you to become more responsive, efficient, and accountable."

However, when you look deeper into their published papers and other documentation, you identify their standard Cloud stack ("Oracle Cloud Offerings: Software-as-a-Service, Global Human Resources, Talent Management, Enterprise Planning, Financial Reporting, Enterprise Resource Planning, Marketing, Citizen Portal Government/Public Services, Billing and Revenue, Management. Platform-as-a-Service. Infrastructure-as-a-Service").

Based on their published contents, the conclusion is the real offering is customization on top of their platform ("Oracle offers cloud applications for every business function and every cloud application comes with modern technologies. Oracle Cloud is built to be citizen centric – to empower your organization to transition to modern practices that deliver better access to services quickly and conveniently, at times and in ways that suit both citizens and employees. Oracle Cloud is personalized, connected, and secure. Oracle Cloud is personalized for each LOB’s demands allowing business users to deliver innovation quickly. It has automated upgrades with built in timing flexibility and allows you to extend beyond what’s in the box using tools you already know and use.")

Next step into the Smart City is the Big Data solution. And Oracle offers their solution with a vision of perfect integration and though the release of tools for developers and data scientists alike.

"Hadoop and Oracle are Complementary. The Oracle Database and a Hadoop cluster can be very complementary. There are several ways to integrate the two solutions; the nature of the data, the type of workload, amount of computer equipment, manpower skills, and service level requirements from the end user will dictate the optimal approach. Oracle Database provides the flexibility to leverage programming language functionality within the database without having to write complex SQL statements by using user defined functions known as Table Functions. The MapReduce programming model can be implemented within the Oracle Database using Parallel Pipelined Table Functions and parallel operations. It is possible to write parallel processing tasks as database queries using user defined Table Functions to aggregate or filter the data. Pipelined Table Functions were introduced in Oracle 9i as a way of embedding procedural logic within a data flow. At a logical level, a Table Function is a user defined function that appears in the FROM clause of a SQL statement and operates like a table returning a stream of rows."

Also, their winning compelling argument and value proposition:

"Why Oracle for Advanced Analytics? 

If you're an enterprise company, chances are you have your data in an Oracle database. You chose Oracle for it's global reputation at providing the best software products (and now engineered systems) to support your organization. Oracle database is known for stellar performance and scalability, and Oracle delivers world class support.

If your data is already in Oracle Database or moving in that direction, leverage the high performance computing environment of the database to analyze your data. Traditionally it was common practice to move data to separate analytic servers for the explicit purpose of model building. This is no longer necessary nor is it scalable as your organization seeks to deliver value from Big Data. Oracle database now has several state of the art algorithms that execute in a parallel and distributed architecture directly in-database and augmented by custom algorithms in the R statistical programming language."

When we come to Oracle's Platform for Smart Cities, we experience the same approach we followed in each step so far: they have their experience, they have products and technology, they have a massive customer base, they have accumulated success cases building parts or different solutions, they can put together all this to build the next, and the next.

What I missed was:

(1) Oracle's own Hadoop distribution, or even the adoption of any distribution with specific tools to build optimized solutions in their Cloud. They stressed out the complementary nature of Oracle Databases and Hadoop, however AWS, Microsoft and Google have gone several steps deeper with tools, services and other components to implement Hadoop based systems in their Cloud.

(2) Even though I talk a lot about Big Data, at the center of this discussion we find solutions and platforms for Smart Cities as main motivation. Oracle has a solid solution map for Smart Cities (click on the picture above to follow the link to their site). It is a compelling vision for any municipality to partner with them, even more with the potential to build a unique vision together, based on their specific needs, having a long and solid success case backlog. I learned most governments look for solutions for their uniqueness from partners with real life experience. However Oracle Smart City solution is opportunistic: they sell their services to develop new solutions based on their products and technologies. It is not an existing Smart City platform with basic city serices that can be customized and augmented.

To close, while AWS, Microsoft and Google offer Cloud technologies and products. Oracle offers services and solutions on top of their products and technologies, combined with a massive industry expertise.

I envision municipalities currently working with Oracle-based solutions simply building their Big Data / Smart City road-maps and having a smooth driveway to the Cloud. Also, I expect Oracle to publish an official paper for different industries, and specifically for municipalities to embark on a Smart City journey.

My take is that their assumption is that city officials consider it trivial by looking the "yes we can do it" type of contents currently published, however IT Management, Analysts and Engineers are having a tough time to explain to politicians and bureaucrats "where will Big Data be located and what we do with it".

And, as we know it, no Big Data, no Smart City.