Secular shift big opportunity for Oracle

MARK Hurd, Oracle's co-president and director, is not very enamoured by catchy IT keywords - such as cloud, big data, IoT (Internet of Things) - that get most people excited.

He notes: "If you run to the top of a building (in Singapore) and shout big data, it's interesting, but at the end of it, if you cannot bring it down to something that's easily understood, the customer doesn't know what to do with it. . . (Similarly), Cloud, cloud! A lot of companies think that if they scream cloud enough times then their stock prices would go up!"

"What we as an industry need to do is quit using terms and start turning these things into meaningful use cases," he says.