Enterprise Software Appetites Are Increasingly Industry-specific

I can remember the first time I saw a web browser in the early 1990’s and thinking “this changes everything.” I’ve been dedicating my career to disruptive technology trends ever since. Today, the media, the public and the technology sector are currently focused on the disruptive power of AI and large language models like Chat GPT or her competitors. And I agree, these technologies are stunning. I believe we’re at an inflection point that will shape the next 30 years of technology-driven changes across business, education, media, politics, and culture.

However, as Rob Tarkoff recently cited that over the past 20 years, the technology landscape has seen an explosion of technology vendors and products; which has then piled high on enterprise plates to a dangerous, unhealthy degree. Adding a new AI feature on top of this already overstuffed menu is unlikely to solve this problem, and it could lead to risky outcomes if eyes remain bigger than stomachs.

The Industry Opportunity

At Oracle, we build and manage technologies that literally run the most complex and sensitive workloads on the planet through our enterprise grade technology and application portfolios. Our customers and partners are solving enterprise-grade problems with Oracle solutions.

And yet, even Oracle recognized that enterprises don’t have a bottomless appetite for technology. Instead, we invest in architecture, platforms and application suites that provide a balanced, appetizing mix of ingredients that we then assemble into healthy, relevant technology and software solutions. When it comes to Industry-specific dietary needs, Oracle has deep expertise and solution portfolios from our Industry Global Business Units to cater to our customers.

About 5 years ago, Oracle CX recognized the chance to not only satisfy the most discerning palates with our Fusion solutions, but we could blend these products with Industry GBU solutions to create something new: CX for Industry suites that would leverage the best of Fusion and the deep Industry expertise of our GBUs in a seamless, cloud-native solution. These solutions provide all of the back-office industry data and systems of record (e.g. billing, metering, inventory, fulfillment, etc.), natively within our front-office CX solutions. This new connected enterprise model increases the flow of data and energizes and accelerates CX and business processes, all with reduced effort and overhead.

Hybrid Diets Provide Long-term Transformation

The tricky parts of any major technology change, is the possibility for failed implementations, or perhaps even if some goals are achieved the likelihood to relapse to bad behaviors is high. Tackling this problem in the context of enterprise systems, means technology leaders must take care to wean themselves off their old dependencies (which in many cases are the core systems that run the business) while they steadily embrace modern solutions that allow the organization to regain agility and speed.

Oracle’s CX for Industry strategic priorities reflect this need through our hybrid design principles baked into our Industry Framework. Our core goal is to allow Oracle’s customers to transform at their speed, but without the risk of failure or relapse. We have invested heavily for years in these five hybrid principles: two-speed architecture for business and IT to innovate independently for agility, co-existence with legacy systems (including non-Oracle) to minimize disruption and leverage existing investment, industry-specific APIs for modern best practices to future proof, adaptive data mastering across multiple systems of record, and single views of data to drive insights across heterogeneous systems.

We’re working with those industry enterprise leaders who saw technology transformation as too risky, and thus stuck in their old unhealthy habits, to invest in this journey that we have mapped out.

Communications and Utilities Are On The Menu, But That’s Just the Start

Many of our CX colleagues building the Fusion Marketing, Sales and Service suites also solve for complex needs: Revenue Transformation and Asset-Based Service are amazing solutions for the High Tech and Industrial Manufacturing industries; while Oracle’s Unity CDP has HIPPAA attestation and can adapt to many industry data models. In short, big parts of CX menu are relevant without significant industry specificity (e.g. marketing campaigns), and other solutions are already highly tailored to a particular CX persona (e.g. field service technicians).

The Oracle CX for Industry organization’s charter is complimentary to these efforts and focuses extending Fusion applications with Oracle Industry GBU solutions’ data, industry API standards, processes and persona-specific UX. Over the past few years our first efforts are designed for personas in the Communications and Utilities (Energy and Water) industries. These CX personas focus on transactional journeys, build and manage products and offers, facilitate sales and commerce experiences, and the assist (or self-service) in post-purchase service and subscription management. CX for Industry solutions meet these product, sales, and service personas’ needs to work faster, more naturally, with less niche expertise required.

As the market gets a taste of these Industry-specific CX solutions, they’ll see (as I do) that they’re the best way to embrace healthy habits that drive long-term transformation. We think the market is hungry for Industry-specific CX solutions, and with early successes as a foundation, we’ll grow our partnerships across the broader Oracle community to serve up the next Industry-specific CX suite(s).