The Petri Dish of Innovation

MKSmith101| October 13, 2009

Welcome from Oracle OpenWorld 2009! This is your Applications Modernization booth monkey, reporting in.

I got to hear Ann Livermore's keynote on Monday, which had a heavy modernization component. She talked about applications modernization as a key mechanism to address core business issues, including rising costs and limited innovation. The latter idea was reinforced for me by the creativity that is rampant in the exhibit hall. Let's face it, the mid-range space is where innovative enterprise capabilities first show up.

Mid-range is the Petri dish of innovation. Your business must be able to take advantage of the diverse offerings in this space. You may end up scaling to high-end servers, but you need to be able to easily pump this mid-range innovation into your systems . A great example of this was included as part of the keynote presentation by Safra Catz and Charles Phillips of Oracle. It dealt with retail planning in the fashion industry and showed the integration of powerful analytics into an extremely intuitive user interface. The goal was to determine opportunities to optimize sales of clothing in terms of locations, campaigns, discounting models, etc. I learned a new phrase, "fashion science", to describe the analytics that add a substantial dose of rigor to a process that used to depend purely on seat-of-the-pants intuition. Based on the Oracle Fusion stack and some powerful third party software, that same creativity can now solve problems at a higher level with tool support for replicable optimization.

Pray that it doesn't rain Wednesday. With any luck, my next post should be something like "Aerosmith as an engine of modernization".

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Labels: modernization| Oracle World

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