OpenWorld: Oracle positions itself as enterprise social leader

SAN FRANCISCO: Not content with positioning itself as the de-facto cloud computing company, Oracle is now promoting itself as the leading social platform provider.

Speaking at the OpenWorld show in San Francisco on Tuesday, chief executive Larry Ellison said that unlike other IT vendors offering social analysis tools, all Oracle applications are designed with social features baked in.

“Social is built into all of our applications,” he said.

“We implemented our social technology at the platform layer. That means every application you build inherits the benefits of social technology. That’s a big difference between us and other people with the approach to social, it’s a technology platform, not just a suite of applications.”

In lieu of any major social product launch, Ellison then gave a detailed demonstration of its Social Relationship Management (SRM) platform, which the firm developed from technology acquired from the purchases of Vitrue in May, Collective Intellect in June and Involver in July.

Ellison showed how SRM could be used by a brand manager to pinpoint the best celebrity ambassador. The platform pulled five billion tweets relating to the Olympics and London 2012 into an Oracle database, and then showed where people were when they sent each tweet, the device they used to send it, and how many followers they had.

Once the top tweeters by followers had been identified, this was then refined based on reach.

The analysis also threw up interesting insight into the devices used by tweeters, with Apple iOS and Android taking the two top spots, but followed not far behind by BlackBerry.

“If I was an investor, I might buy a little bit of that RIM stock,” he quipped, quickly following that up with a Safe Harbour statement to prevent the rumour mill going into overdrive about an Oracle/RIM merger.