Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

How Oracle differentiates itself from its key competitors is that they have a very big support eco-system says Dave Mommen, Business Analytics Lead, ASEAN & SAGE at Oracle when Big Community interviewed him during his short stint in Malaysia between his long travels.

We spoke to Dave about the latest trends in the market and how Oracle have been keeping abreast with those trends and addressing the issues to keep businesses abreast with the regions digital transformation.

Some of the key trends in data analytics that he’s noticed is businesses are including more external data, using more big data tools, adopting IOT and finding ways of detecting patterns in the data. Essentially becoming a data rich company.

“There isn’t a company out there anymore who is interested in being data poor. Data is the new asset, the new form of capital. In my view it will become a new currency.” Though data is already being exchanged but it is believed to become much more popular as a mode of currency.

Big data is run on commodity hardware and open source software. Oracle has embraced those architectures and principals and started building around it.

He shared about the Big Data Appliance which is a major trend that is being addressed.

“The idea behind the Big Data Appliance is simple. The people at this table are smart enough to build their own bicycle. But it will take a long while and they probably won’t win the tour De France with it,” he said in jest. “Yet the thinking behind the data appliance is similar as a preconfigured machine so as they won’t have to set up their own Hadoop cluster. The machine is fully equipped and ready to go.”

Big Data Discovery or BDD is another tool that helps users run their data through and find insights to assist them in creating better business analysis. Dave explains.

“BDD allows users to look into the data. Imagine that you are running a data scientist team for a big bank and you’ve been instructed to set up a big data infrastructure and need to ingest all sorts of transactions.

“Now you are going to have people look into that data lake that has been created because there will be a lot of unstructured data in there as well as structured and transactional data in there. As you a scientist you have to go and explain to business users what kind of analysis they can get from there.

“That can lead to a whole series of meetings where you are trying to explain how the data is related. So with BDD the process is expedited. The product allows the user to look into the data link, explore the data that is in there and automatically profile the data and give an idea of how complete the data is and what data is missing.”

In short, BDD enables businesses to get insights out of their big data investments quicker while running on Hadoop platform.

“Take for instance a guy from marketing who wants to look at the way certain data are linked. By selecting the data entities on the screen, the system will automatically scan and find relationships between them. So the business users can immediately see any relation between the selected data items and the user can start to act on that.”

Possibly even using the data information to socially profile users instead of just profiling based on demographics,” he added saying that there are many big data connectors that can be used for the big data appliance also available at Oracle.

BDD although launched approximately 18 months ago is just now finding its way into the Asian market.

“My observation while running the business analytics team for the region, is that most organisations have now come to the turning point where they understand how to leverage big data and how to make money from it. Which was not the case two years ago when people were exploring and experimenting on it. Now they have started finding efficient insights.”

The platform has been available in Asia but Dave sees the adoption taking place only recently with Thailand especially taking drastic steps along with Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia in the fray.

Another big trend is data visualisation, Dave offers.

“They don’t want to look at tables of information anymore. They want to see a graph that makes sense. Hence the need for better data visualization. We’ve always had those,” he says.

The way to go previously was to hire a consulting firm, to analyse your needs to build a BI team. It will be a big investment, where 18 months down the road you would have a great working system.

That created a gap for information and data hungry users in the organisation who were quite IT savvy. As data needs to be pulled together and visualised in some way, the Mr Excel or the go to guy who wants more visualisation capabilities will be the ones who wish to have that ready at hand. They want to run their own self service BI. They didn’t want to request from the central BI team and wait 6 weeks for reports from the BI team. Hence the big trend around self service BI.

“Here is where Oracle have been working on addressing that need just over a year now with Oracle Data Visualisation. We have it on the cloud and a desk top version that you can download.”

Although there are many companies who are offering these visualisation analytics, Dave explains how Oracle are different.

“Where we see a new trend emerging in self- serving BI, if you are a millennial, and you are IT savvy, you want to create your own data. You don’t just want to pick data off a data warehouse. You probably want to do some data modelling and mashups. So what we are seeing now is the democratization of ETL. Self-service ETL if you will. This is another set of features that we are building into the DV product.”

With the speed that technology has been attacking businesses data centres, vendors who are ahead of the game tend to stay ahead simply because they have a good foothold and understanding of the current trends. Although Oracle have been a little late to the game in BI offerings, they have always been in the background and been keeping up with what they see as current trends. With their recent offering of self-service ETL and data preparation features however, Dave believes this will propel them to the forefront and possibly ahead of the competition.

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