thomas.wieberneit@aheadcrm.co.nz
Clash of Titans – SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Oracle Quo Vadis?

Clash of Titans – SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Oracle Quo Vadis?

Following all those announcements of AI, machine learning, IoT, IaaS, PaaS and what not over the past months, I was beginning to wonder where the big business software vendors are going. What is the game plan of Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP? How does newcomer Adobe fit in there? Maybe Amazon and Google, too; or Facebook. It is a time for another Quo Vadis – this time: Quo Vadis, industry? Clash of Titans In the last about 2 – 3 years we have seen a strong acceleration of innovation, or at least talk about it. Cloud computing, offering nearly unlimited scalability and elasticity of computing resources has become main stream. Cloud computing also allows for nearly 100 per cent uptime Since the advent of the iPhone (yes, I know this was earlier than 2013) the proliferation of sensors has increased a lot, resulting in them becoming cheaper and cheaper, allowing for an increasing number of data rich applications This has also driven fast mobile connectivity, which has become nearly ubiquitous; maybe except a few blessed spots on this planet, which will be covered soon, too. Think of Google’s Balloon project or Facebook’s drone Memory has become dirt cheap, and fast In-memory technologies, No-SQL databases, Hadoop, Spark, and improvements of analytics algorithms make it possible to work with huge sets of data in real time The (re-)emergence of AI technologies, progress in machine learning and deep learning, enabled by the now available computing power, help in pattern recognition that allows machine driven suggestion, prediction, and prescription of actions, based upon huge amounts of data Data, be it machine-generated or human created...