Oracle Mobility Emerges Prepared for the Future

Suhas Uliyar

My friend Suhas Uliyar is now the VP of Mobile Strategy Product Management at Oracle, and he is eager to get the word out that Oracle mobility is real and here today. While SAP jumped big time into enterprise mobility in 2010 with the $5.8 billion acquisition of Sybase, Oracle has been quietly watching the market and practicing patience. They seemed for a long time to be content with standing on the side lines and treating mobility as just another channel or interface for their backend servers, solutions and databases.

Today, however, they have a multitude of rapidly growing enterprise mobility solutions and an aggressive plan and strategy for enterprise mobility.  Among their mobility products are the following:

• Oracle Mobility Suite - MADP
• Oracle Mobile Security Suite - Mobile Application Management/Security
• Oracle ADF Mobile, soon to be named Mobile Application Framework - mobile app SDK
• Oracle Mobile Cloud - MBaaS category of products

In recent years, Oracle has been surrounded by rumors they would acquire a leading MADP (mobile application development platform) vendor like Antenna Software, Kony, Verivo, etc. However, mobile platform vendors have come and gone without Oracle acting.  Analysts (I was one of them) and competitors (read SAP) were publicly challenging Oracle on their lack of action in the enterprise mobility space.  At one point, Oracle product managers called me to request the use of my enterprise mobility presentation at their conferences.  Yikes!  Clearly someone was desperate!

History, however, may reward Oracle's patience.  While veteran mobile platform vendors (including SAP) have struggled to keep up with the fast changing market, R&D investment requirements, the fickle preferences of mobile developers, and the emergence of cloud-based mobile services, Oracle has kept their focus on supporting mobile developers with integration services and tools that extend their solutions out to mobile apps. This enabled them to follow a long term, methodical and standards-based approach to mobility insulated from the ever changing mobile app development and platform space of the past few years.  It is good to have some quiet time to think and observe.

As we near the mid-year mark in 2014, it seems like the enterprise mobility market is finally stabilizing. The lessons of early adopters have been learned and shared, strengths and weaknesses of various strategies have been exposed, and the preferences of developers and IT leaders are starting to clarify.  I bet SAP wishes they had their $5.8 billion back in their pocket to invest today.

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Kevin Benedict

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Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation, EBA, Center for the Future of Work Cognizant

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.