Nice question if you ask me. And if you would have asked me one year ago (just after #oow10) I would have said: "Well, good question..." And like a good consultant should, adding to that: "You should look at what is already there rather than what is missing..."
This year at #oow11 it was a totally different story! Everywhere you went mobile popped up and drew attention of many people. BTW with mobile of course I mean the use of mobile platforms and devices and based on that applications that make the use of these devices fit the needs of the contemporary business user.
Another good thing to know in this context is the expectation about the usage / adoption of mobile: by 2016, there will be around 5 billion mobile users worldwide!
So let's look at a couple of examples, how Oracle is doing in the mobile area:
Padzilla
During Oracle OpenWorld the company Crunchy Logistics placed a so called Padzilla, a huge 70" iPad near the Exhibition grounds in the Moscone Center. It showed the Oracle Fusion Tap which is the Oracle Fusion Applications Mobile app! More on this later on in this blog post.
Oracle ADF & ADF Mobile
At #oow11 Oracle also announced the new version of Oracle ADF (Mobile)
Hottest thing here is that the framework will contain a "build once, deploy to many" feature for mobile applications. So Mobile applications will be developed from JDeveloper and at deployment time a developer can choose to which platform it needs to be deployed.
OBIEE goes Mobile
For OBIEE Oracle developed a brand new mobile app (currently for the iOS platform only) which enables the OBIEE dashboard on you rmobile device! As mentioned brand new so it better supports todays touchscreen gestures and also things like click through analyses, publisher reports, scorecards, alerts and catalog search.
And probably the best thing is: all BI content created within the OBIEE application is instantly available on mobile devices! No further development necesarry.
Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c
Oracle not only thought of the business user as it comes to mobile, also the Technical Administrators of business applications now have the abillity to utilize their iPad in their work environment. Let's face it: they will have the capabilities to link their devices directly to the BO systems and overcoming the technical hurdles that brings ;-)
What Oracle did is with the 12c (BTW the c of course stands for cloud) version of Enterprise Manager, made it Mobile app enabled.
So now an administrator can be in a meeting and solve the technical database issue with your critical business application right away from his iPad or choose to deploy a test application to the Oracle Public cloud environment in one click to free up space in the companies own datacentre from his iPhone!
Fusion Applications
As mentioned earlier in this post Oracle has been further developing Fusion applications and announced a brand new mobile app which will be added to the Fusion Applications product family: Fusion Tap
This will bring the productivity and collaboration of Fusion Applications right to your mobile device!
But there's more...
Besides all of the examples above Oracle has also been further developing Mobile applications that were already available out there.
Examples are Siebel Sales apps and the app for WebCenter Spaces.
Is Oracle ready for mobile?
So the conclusion from this is, that yes Oracle had some catching up to do. They definitely put a lot of effort in it and to my opinion they succeeded in catching up and overtaking!
Are you currently looking for mobile appliances within your business, either provided out-of-the-box or customly built to fit your exact needs: Oracle is more than capable of fulfilling that for you.
So if you want to move mobile with your organisation / enterprise: go for Oracle!
Arjan Kramer is Solution Architect and thoughtleader for Oracle WebCenter at Capgemini. follow him at twitter.com/arjankramer
Originally posted on the Capgemini Oracle Blog
