I’m here with my colleagues, Holger Mueller @holgermu and Doug Henschen @DHenschen, covering the #OracleCloud Summit 2016 in NYC at the Waldorf Astoria @WaldorfNYC. (BTW the Waldorf Astoria has great customer service!!!)

MY POV: My overall take away is that Oracle has built / are building the most comprehensive cloud offering – Data as a Service (DaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas).

B2B Customer Experience: How does an application consume all this data – from service, sales, marketing, mobile… to result in a business outcome? That’s my focus- not as much on all the data or infrastructure – but rather what is the customer / business outcome that all this provides? Here’s an example…

The person is coming close to the company and gets a notification to look to see more about how well the account is doing (Account Health.) I (as this sales person) sign-in and I find out that from service cloud, that this is not a “healthy” customer, so I can’t talk to them about adding services or products. I’m walking into a situation where there is an issue that has not been resolved. If I did log on and see there weren’t any issues, I might be able to start the conversation about what they might buy. Instead, I’d start by solving the unresolved issue. I can also see the opportunity for what they might buy if I can solve their issue.

Customer Service Is Mission Critical: This makes so much sense and why customer service needs to be a mission critical part of the overall business strategy. It is the canary in the coal mine. Everything you need to know about what your customers think and feel about your products and services can be found in customer service. It always has been. It’s only recently, by connecting marketing, sales, service, that we can actually use that information to make better business decisions. I like this a lot. It’s something I’ve been on a soapbox for years. I thank the cloud for bringing all these applications together so that we can have this integrated view of our companies.

Customer Success Management: What some of the conversation today reminds me of customer success management. I have written about this in separate reports for vendors that specialize in looking at how well an application has been deployed, used, by whom and for what. It seems this idea has been translated into the Platform as a Service by Oracle, to be able to know more about my customers and determine if they are happy and if not, and what I, as for example a salesperson, can do. It only makes sense. If you have the data, why not use it to know if your customer is happy? No customers, no business. It’s really that simple. This capability may not be as developed as the customer success management vendors, but it’s definitely in the right direction.

Customer Experience: Certainly it’s gotten more difficult to manage devices and channels and predict customer behavior. One of the TRENDS at #oraclecloud is to have all data in one place, analyzed to help brands to deliver the right message, at the right & real time, which results in much better customer experiences #cx for the customer and better business results for the brand.

The message is that Oracle ID Graph can be used to connect customer behavior to get right message, to the right channel via modeling the data to discover the best decisions.

From analyzing all this data, Oracle has found the best predictor of future purchases is past purchases. This shows that one of the real values of data is customer’s behavior. If businesses can understand “Say, Do, Buy” they will be able to target, personalize and measure the success of the customer experience across devices and channels via this Identity Graph.

Future of B2C and B2B: If #oraclecloud could measure TV ads, it could put end to guessing how much money and where to spend money on TV ads. This is a huge challenge that needs to be solved. That would be a service that would put an end to the huge amounts of money that lead to the famous quote – “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” by John Wannamaker.

Mark Hurd @MarkVHurd: He’s speaking to us about their need to shift to persona selling, which they are and have done. It used to be that the buyer was the CIO. But the cloud has brought new buyers to the table – CMO’s, Customer Experience Professionals, Customer Service… Smart. The line of business doesn’t have to wait in line for IT’s list of to do’s. Maybe IT still needs to stay focused on their list. Certainly much of what they do is needed. And maybe it was never realistic to think they could do all that is required in IT and to service the lines of business. Perhaps that is part of the beauty of the cloud. It puts the line of business in charge of their needs in software / hardware.

Mark is also talking to us about the idea that the focus of software as a service is interested in the business outcome, rather than what software companies used to focus on, which was the product. This is something that is so important. Software / Hardware for the sake of software / hardware is not enough, at least in my opinion. Until the cloud, the multiple customer personas didn’t have as much buying power and they didn’t have the weight they do now. Yes, hardware / software all needs to work, be secure, be fast, etc.. but at the end of the day, it has to provide a business owner capabilities that make their business run better. Period.

Great information. Great Summit.

@Dr Natalie Petouhoff, Constellation Research, VP and Principal Analyst, Covering Customer-facing Applications