Tim Jennings, Chief Analyst & Research Fellow, Enterprise IT

Oracle’s September 2013 customer event was notable for a series of announcements designed to help the company’s customers improve the speed and agility of their information systems. The flagship news revolved around Oracle’s core competence of database technology, with forthcoming releases of an in-memory option for Oracle Database 12c that promises to significantly speed up analytic queries, and of an enterprise-grade Database as a Service (DBaaS) offering, part of the Oracle Public Cloud. The latter is reaching a new level of maturity, assisted by the acquisition earlier in 2013 of cloud infrastructure specialist Nimbula.

One of the dominant themes of the conference was machine-to-machine (M2M) technology and the Internet of Things (IoT), and here Oracle is positioning its Java technology as an end-to-end platform for solution development. It also announced an upcoming new version of its Java as a …