CEO Larry Ellison delivered an ambitious 24-month roadmap of priorities for the nearly 35,000 attendees at Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco yesterday afternoon. From open standards and security to industry functionality, business intelligence and automation, Oracle has the scale to invest in meeting customers' most-demanding requirements.

"Scale is very important in the software business," Ellison said. "As we get larger, we're able to invest more money."
Oracle's focus starts with supporting open standards in order to provide customers with flexibility in their software investment. Oracle was founded on support for industry standards, according to Ellison, when it introduced its first relational database based on SQL rather than a proprietary language. Now, open standards are at the heart of the company's development of Oracle Fusion Middleware with "Hot-Pluggable" capabilities and its focus on Service Oriented Architecture. Both are giving customers the ability to integrate heterogeneous applications and technology.

"Choice is a good thing," Ellison said. "Everything else being equal, we'd like to give you as many choices as we can."


Larry Ellison

Security also is a core part of Oracle's heritage, and Ellison said that it is becoming increasingly important as customers open more access to their systems over the Internet. "We're the only applications company doing a comprehensive job with security," he said. "It's the No. 1 issue ." Oracle is building the broadest set of security features into its technology stack, such as encryption for securing data and intrusion detection for preventing unauthorized access to applications.

While automating business processes has been crucial to Oracle applications customers, business intelligence is just as important. Oracle is focused on closely linking process automation and business intelligence so that enterprises gain their business insight directly from their customers and the market. Said Ellison: "The process automation cannot be separate from the business intelligence. They really have been two separate worlds until now."

Oracle has gained industry-tailored business applications with recent acquisitions, but Ellison said that Oracle's industry functionality extends far beyond applications and features. Oracle is building industry expertise directly into its technology stack, including the Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Fusion Middleware. As an example, Ellison explained that Oracle is developing Voice over IP features for its middleware that could appeal to the telecommunications industry.

"We adapt our product stack to your particular needs," Ellison said. "We don't adapt just the applications."

As in previous Oracle OpenWorld keynotes, Ellison emphasized the importance of grid computing and explained that enterprise grids are on the verge of becoming the standard across enterprises. Oracle is focused on the final piece -- adding greater automation in management and monitoring for grid computing.