At CloudWorld in New York, Oracle CEO Mark Hurd provided an overview of the state of the IT market and offered four predictions for the enterprise technology changes that can be expected by 2020-2025.
Pressure on CEOs is mounting, said Hurd, who pointed to a number of factors. Global GDP is increasing but slowly, with less growth in commerce than in previous decades. In addition, the average CEO lasts only 18 quarters, offering them little time to make big changes. At the same time, disruption is occurring across all sectors. The Blockbuster video rental business was “disintermediated” by video streaming, and Borders book stores has been disintermediated by Amazon.
These changes happen fast, said Hurd, noting that half of the companies on the Fortune 500 list in 2000 are gone now.
“Sometimes, the job gets on top of you before you get on top of it,” said Hurd referring to the short professional lifespan of the average CEO. And disruption is continuing across industries, he noted, citing Airbnb’s entry into the hospitality market, Lyft’s impact on the auto industry, and other startups like Bloom Energy in the energy space, Stripe in payment processing, and Warby Parker in eyeglass retailing.
Mark Hurd’s 4 Predictions for 2020-2025:
- More than 50% of all enterprise data will be managed autonomously and be more secure. Machine-learning-based automation means less human labor and no human error; autonomous databases automatically provision monitor backup recover update and patch while running; and it also lowers risk and eliminates downtime, said Hurd. Highly automated security and management allows companies to see threats before they happen, he pointed out, stating that attacks not only impact data and revenue but also cause long term damage to brand reputation. According to Hurd, 85% of exploits had a patch available for more than 1 year, and 74% of organizations take 3 months to apply a patch, said Hurd, who throughout his presentation urged attendees to think about the possibility of testifying before Congress or explaining a breach to their board of directors. Patching is difficult because of all the heterogeneity, but that is alleviated by automation, said Hurd. “We have announced the autonomous database but I think you are going to find that as it comes out it is not going to just be about security, cost, and performance, it is going to be about all of them.”
- Even highly regulated industries will shift 50% of their production workloads to cloud. Regulated industries want the benefits of public cloud but often can’t move for data privacy and sovereignty reasons. Bringing public cloud functionality behind company firewalls offers the potential to overcome these changes and offers an on-ramp to cloud services, said Hurd, pointing to Oracle’s Cloud at Customer offering. Cloud at Customer will accelerate the move of regulated industries to the cloud, he added.
- By 2020, 90% of all enterprise applications will feature integrated AI capabilities. Showcasing the capabilities across Oracle offerings such as the CX Cloud, HCM Cloud, SCM Cloud, and ERP Cloud, Hurd said that, by 2020, 100% of all enterprise applications will claim to support AI but only a few will integrate AI across all of their apps, platform and data as a service.
- The top ERP vendor in the cloud will own more than half of the market. The idea that companies are going to buy a variety of apps from different vendors and maintain silos is not the way the market is going to move, said Hurd. People are going to want to have not just the back office, HR, and ERP - but all their apps - integrated with the ability to share information across them all, he explained, noting it is unrealistic to expect that organizations will move their on-premise complexity to the cloud and, instead, will look for fewer players, more strategic partners.