Strategic Shifts: The 'New' Oracle and MongoDB
It's no longer enough to be merely a database company, as Oracle and MongoDB pursue new visions of what's next
It’s been another busy week in the database market as I catch up from a trip to San Francisco, where I participated in the Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon. Here’s my take on two of the big announcements of the past week.
What is Oracle?
Let’s start with Oracle’s just-completed $28 billion acquisition of electronic health records provider Cerner. It’s a milestone in Oracle’s ongoing transformation into something more than a database company. But what is Oracle if not a database company?
This shift has been underway for 20-something years — I think of Oracle’s acquisition of PeopleSoft in 2004 as an earlier milestone. Now with Oracle’s acquisition of Cerner you can see the path ahead. “This is now our primary mission at Oracle,” Larry Ellison said in laying out Oracle’s ambitious strategy with Cerner.
The grand plan includes building a “unified national health records database,” which is meant to solve the problem of fragmented and balkanized data that has plagued, frustrated, and hamper…