Oracle announces slew of social and mobile features to 'reach users rather than data scientists'

Collaboration tools, multiple mobile platform development products and a "corporate Facebook" are all offered up

Oracle today reasserted its attempts to be as warm and fluffy as its rivals, unleashing a barrage of consumerised skews on its products to help "reach users rather than data scientists".

Introduced by executive vice president of product development Thomas Kurian, Oracle announced or updated a total of nine different products, all heavily geared towards a now-established market of enterprise users who'd rather use a smartphone than a PC to get their work done.

Much of the UI upgrades come under the heading of the Oracle Alta UI, which Oracle is calling "the new standard", and what Kurian called in one example "the face of Hadoop".

"We want to open up Hadoop to reach users, rather than professional data scientists", said Kurian, at a press conference following the keynote.

The clean and clear new look places mobile at the top of the agenda, which segues neatly into Kurian's other major announcement - the Mobile Application Framework.
"With BYOD, you have iOS or Android, maybe Windows and BlackBerry depending on company," he said.

"You have small tablets, big tablets, six different platforms, and having that many versions is a challenge. Mobile Application Framework adapts instantly to iOS or Android."

Similar but different is the Mobile Application Accelerator which, promises Oracle, "enables nontechnical staff to build their own mobile applications".

Further, Kurian spoke of Oracle offering a form of mobile application management, which in an update to the Mobile Security Container, will offer per-application security on devices that use the Oracle platform.

On top, Oracle is now pushing a document collaboration application that Kurian described as "corporate Facebook", and which can sync the status files across several devices.

All this is, as co-CEO Mark Hurd so eloquently put it yesterday, "so much stuff", but is basically Oracle just trying to fill every tiny crack in its ongoing offerings.

With Salesforce similarly tackling the mobile and consumerisation issue with Salesforce1 last year - a mobile API wrapper product that even at the time was dubbed by one analyst as literally not existing, and being simply "a branding exercise" - Oracle obviously understands the importance of appearing in control of a world that, as Kurian said this morning, is now accessing the internet from mobile devices in 87 per cent of instances.