Mark Hurd, President of Oracle, has more than one reason to be happy this week. He keeps getting messages from his colleagues about the exploits made by the Oracle Team USA sailors in the Bay Area which is not very from the Moscone convention centre where about 60,000 techies from across the world gathered for Oracle Open World.

He also has just released a slew of products such as In-Memory, which promises to make search queries (such as those we make at Wikipedia) way better. The company says big data heralds information age. The annual Oracle rendezvous offers a peep into the upcoming products in the cloud, analytics and other technological areas.

Oracle customers, developers, analysts and system integrators take part in the week-long conference and expo. “We have won the fifth race in the Americas Cup,” an elated Hurd said as he announced investments of $5 billion on research and development in product development in cloud, applications, vertical integration and acquisitions.

The company, which made revenues of $37 billion in 2013, spent $29 billion on R&D and $56 billion on more than 90 acquisitions, related to how big data could be harnessed in improving delivery of services. Hurd showed the example of Airbus that was trying to gather information from its aircraft flown by 25 different carriers and scan for relevant data from about 1.5 million flight hours. You can solve the problems real-time by sifting through the information quickly.

(The author is in San Francisco at the invitation of Oracle)

Related Topics