Oracle Open World 2008 Excel4apps HBO deal
As frequent readers of my blog know, I believe one of the largest growth industries in technology will be the merging of traditional networking and software companies products with the digital asset management issues of new and old media. But despite what the title of this article might infer, this story won't be about that topic!
However, it does point to two key trends:
1) Oracle continues it strong lead in providing finance and HR departments the robust databases needed to track information in enterprise organizations.
2) Customers love Microsoft's Excels front end.
I can't emphasize the second point enough. My experience with users is that they learned how to work the interface of Excel and Access. For years, many large companies kept Excel spreadsheets and particularly Access databases, that contained key information for the company, in programs that had far outgrown the capacity and depth of the content. Excel, Access, and Filemaker, because of their ease of use and frequent availability, are the starter drugs of data organization. Many consultants have horror stories of homegrown databases that have become too large, resulting in strange data disorganization.
However, most power users know how to create pivot tables in Excel, they worked hard to learn that skill, and you will have to pull the keyboard out of their cold, dead hands before they give it up.
Excel4apps GL Wand allows the user to keep the Excel UI that they know, but combines it with the deep structure, security, and sophistication of Oracle's database. For many offices this could become the peacemaker between the need to have robust database and an interface that end users love. Anybody who has witnessed the stress and fear of a major software conversion can cause will truly appreciate the benefit of this software.