by Angela Guess
Quentin Hardy of the New York Times reports, “Last week I sat down with Mark V. Hurd, Oracle’s co-president, for a talk about Oracle’s strategy. Most of his conversation had to do with the problems facing big companies as they adapt to a world of mobile devices, cloud computing and huge amounts of data. ‘Customers are growing their data storage by 35 percent to 40 percent a year,’ Mr. Hurd said. He also said that this figure is only likely to rise with an increasing number of data-collecting sensors and captured Web clicks. ‘They are paying $9,000 a terabyte to store it. Now, we have big customers sitting on 80, 90, 100 petabytes of storage. Even with good discounts, they are paying $300 million a year just to store data’.”
Hardy goes on, “The next issue, he said, was gathering insights about customers from all that data. ‘Only 38 percent of big brands can connect with their customers via mobile devices,’ he said. ‘The ones that can have a meaningful dialogue are about 10 percent. To actually transact business in an enjoyable way, that’s about 3 percent.’ Mr. Hurd made these points to underline the importance of new data storage technologies, like the one Oracle is offering, which, he said, would shrink data storage by close to 90 percent. And once the data is stored, Oracle’s analysis software will be deployed to improve how businesses find and interact with customers, he said.”
photo credit: Oracle
