Oracle PaaS Forum 2019 – My Top Three Takeaways

It is a busy time of year with all the events of the spring. First, there was Motiv’s Customer Experience Leadership Summit in Austin. Second, was Oracle’s Modern CX in Las Vegas. Finally, the Oracle PaaS forum in Mallorca, Spain. The Oracle PaaS Forum offers its attendees more hands on interaction with the Oracle platform-as-a-service offerings. It is exciting to see the solutions up close and personal. Based on what I’ve seen so far, here are my top takeaways on what matters.

Oracle Content And Experience (“OCE”) Might Revolutionize the Way we Think about Content

From Humble Beginnings

When I started investigating OCE 9 months ago, my impression was that it was an enterprise Word Press. Sure, it had some nice features, but I questioned the product’s viability as something that would have significant business value. This conference answered my question. The rapid development of OCE from a simple site builder tool to a global enterprise content hub has been stunning.

A Game Changing Strategy

I spent some time with the product development team and I finally get the strategy. The OCE team sees web pages (as in ALL web pages) as a cute relic of our time. In the place of web pages, will be an entirely new means of provisioning content that our customers can consume. OCE believes that the days of building web pages will be replaced. Most of us consume everything from a series of channels (social, web, email, text, chat and more). Naturally, our content should move from channel to channel without a rebuild. The content should be delivered without forcing a digital marketer to think about how to deliver it.

What It Means For Digital Marketers

If it works digital marketers can worry less about being “digital” and invest more time in being a “marketer”. As a result, they can use their energy and talent to make their business more competitive and spend less time worrying about how to make a web page look good.

OCE Signals a CX Orientation

I am also glad to see that OCE is orienting itself to be aligned with the rest of the Oracle Customer Experience suite. It appears to me that OCE will move internally to the CX team. That means the same talented people who help customers determine the best combination of Engagement Cloud, Eloqua, Commerce, Social and more will now be thinking about how to add OCE to a customer’s solution. That can only bring good things to Oracle customers. Migrating from other platforms like Hub Spot and Adobe where content has been a larger part of the marketing automation solution will be easier.

Oracle Digital Assistants (i.e. Chat Bots) Are Very Cool. They will Seriously Improve Customer Experience While Lowering Support Costs

The Most Human Human

A few years ago I read the book “The Most Human Human” by Brian Christian. The book is a fascinating exploration of one question: “If you are conversing with someone over chat, how could your counterpart know you are human and not a bot?” Christian explores ways in which he can beat the bots and truly become the “most human human” at the annual Turing Test competition. (Spoiler alert: He won!)

The Most Human AI

Since reading the book I’ve been fascinated with the concept of making a bot that appears human. Yet, I have never had time to dive in. With Oracle PaaS Digital Assistant, I might get my chance. The Oracle Digital Assistant platform is designed to build a chat bot that has a purpose (Oracle calls it a “Skill”). The customer can collaborate with the bot to complete the task in a very conversational manner. Examples I saw included ordering a pizza, buying a plane ticket and turning in an expense report.

It Starts with Skills

With the right design of a set of skills, a company like yours and mind can guide a customer through a task quickly and efficiently. The bot can draw information via integration from many sources and solving the customers problem. Because each “Skill” can operate with other “Skills”, you can even solve multiple problems for a customer one-at-a-time or in any order. The customer will feel that they are dealing with one super-smart agent. Helpful agents will provide a customer experience that is a million times better than the ultra slow live agent chat experiences.

And Goes Global

The platform uses natural language processing (i.e the stuff that makes Amazon Alexa and Siri work) built in. I get the impression that the Oracle EU team is taking the lead on Digital Assistant. The product team appears very aware of making sure the bot will operate in multiple languages. If they pull that off, it means one bot will naturally converse in several languages from a single code set. I was also impressed with the modular design and coding language needed to make a bot go. A good collaboration between a developer and a customer experience consultant will allow two person teams to make bots that might even win a turning test!

Oracle Internet Of Things (“IOT”) Platform Can Transform Business Operations

What is IOT?

A lot of people hype the Internet of Things. In college (a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away) my first experience with IOT came via an undergrad engineering design challenge. We had to “connect the internet and something in our dorm room”. The winning team made a homemade mailbox with a flag that raised when they received an email. Cute, but um . . . so what?

Where IOT Matters Most

IOT has come a long way since then. Oracle seems laser focused on a few high impact user cases where there platform can really shine:

1. Industrial companies that want to gather feedback from big static assets (generators, cranes, machines, towers, etc). Understanding their performance can better predict their operational efficiency and set up preventive maintenance schedules.
2. Fleet companies that want to track their trucks, forklifts, vans, bikes, drones and other things that go. This insight allows companies to react to unforeseen events in record time.
3. Wearable/field tech companies that want to track the interaction of a human being with a device (think the UPS guy and his trusty scanner) as they perform their work functions.

I Wish We Had IOT

At Motiv we built an IOT solution for a med device company a few years ago and while we were successful, I wish we’d had the Oracle IOT platform. The IOT platform solves a lot of problems we encountered, such as:

A) Hooking up devices through the Internet is not trivial – It took months to help the product engineers develop a method for sending us the data and the string of information we got was crude and difficult to parse. Oracle has a series of connectors that make device connection a lot easier.

B) The testing began only after the devices connected successfully – You can imagine how painful that was at the time. Oracle has a “digital twin” that can emulate the device so can begin testing and simulating how your device will send you information so you can think about what to do next. That speeds up development time and boosts reliability.

C) Storage and Reporting got overwhelming quickly – These devices can obtain a LOT of data. So where are you going to put that data and then report on it in a scalable manner? Oracle’s IOT platform seems to have that covered with trusty Oracle cloud storage and the usual array of OBIEE reporting tools.

D) We never even through about Machine Learning or AI – Oracle’s machine learning and AI suite are rapidly percolating through the Oracle application stack. IOT is no exception.

What Does It All Mean?

When Oracle PaaS division emerged a few years ago, I was skeptical. Oracle PaaS had a lot of false starts. Early on, the division lost credibility with me due to some technology debacles (product names withheld to protect the innocent). Those products were released WAY too soon and damaged the credibility of Oracle PaaS. Thanks to this forum, my opinion of the Oracle PaaS stack has gone up considerably, though I am keeping a sharp eye on them. It must be said that some of the products (other than those above) still have a long way to go. Yet, the community of developers here are serious. Based on the questions and interactions, I can see that Oracle is building a dedicated core of a developer community that spans the globe.

Oracle is a Good Bet

At its heart, Oracle is a dedicated technology company that spends more on research and development than the entire GDP of many nations! (6.1 Billion in 2018 ). There is no doubt that Oracle can achieve great things wherever it places the emphasis. With the company now emphasizing the cloud in a million different ways, the results are beginning to show. Just as Oracle has pulled into the lead with cloud CX applications, I am confident they are moving in the same direction with their PaaS offerings. We at Motiv are excited to go with them.

Go Oracle!