Suhas Uliyar, Vice President, Mobile Strategy & Product Management, Oracle, shares insights into how IT heads can address the challenges of enterprise mobility in an interview to Pupul Dutta. Excerpts:
Isn’t Oracle a little late to the mobility business?
Well, mobile has gone through an interesting evolution and has been deployed in enterprises for over a decade in a lot of variations and trends. Enterprises are now re-looking at mobile and we have the perfect opportunity right now, especially since enterprises are shifting from tactical approaches to a more strategic architecture that brings together the convergence of social, mobile, web and the internet of things. Overall, we are yet to find enterprises that are taking a really holistic approach to mobile, in an ever changing landscape of mobile devices and new types of interfaces. We have an opportunity to leapfrog and address customer pain points in this new landscape.
What is your strategy to gain share in this market, where some of your competitors are way ahead?
Our strategy is to simplify mobility for our customers. Given Oracle’s breadth and depth of providing apps and middleware, we are approaching mobility in three ways, whereas our competitors are in one or two buckets, providing either apps or infrastructure. So, what we are doing is that we are providing out-of-the-box mobile apps based on our platform to a lot of the Oracle backend—be it Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards or Enterprise Business Suite solutions. Our customers can further extend the web based applications built on the Fusion Middleware stack (where we are number one leader) to mobile as well.
Even if we just focus on our own customers—be it Oracle’s apps customers or Fusion Middleware customers—there are enough customers for us to be market leaders without breaking a sweat. And the reason we are so confident about this is the aspect of mobile security where Oracle leads the market.
The competitors are going to struggle because the world of mobile is moving away from very complex and conformist model to more of a simplistic model in the cloud. This is what is going to enable us to leapfrog and gain market share because we can go across the stack from small and medium to large enterprises. To summarise, there are two reasons why and how we are going to gain market share, one is our existing customer base in apps and middleware and the second is the platform that enables us to have a larger ecosystem to reach individual developers as well as larger enterprises and everything in between.
What are the challenges faced by enterprises with respect to mobility?
The challenge is really to think more strategically than tactically. The hurdle enterprises face today, is how to really create an architecture where they are not sort of trying to boil the ocean but take perhaps a baby step approach and not put themselves in a corner. So, organisations are going mobile, starting with small projects, but they also do not want a situation wherein, as more and more apps come in and more users join in, they have to redo the architecture.
Another challenge for enterprises is to adopt a BYOD strategy that addresses security and a much holistic architecture that complies with their existing infrastructure. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, they can take advantage of all the investments they have made. This is why we believe that we are not late to market because, basically, hundreds and thousands of our middleware customers can take advantage of the investments they have made and, in a few weeks, start delivering the applications.
In the past, if anyone were to ask me how much time it will take to build a mobile app, I would have said six months to a year. What is happening with our customers now is that they are delivering these apps in weeks. With this change, enterprises are becoming more agile. Now updates happen overnight, a day after the original download. So, this is the kind of speed and efficiency customers are hoping to get.
