What Does the Future Hold for Oracle?

I suppose I'm worried. I have been working around Oracle for almost my entire adult life. I am attached to the *&^% thing!

But a worrisome trendline has emerged: The form of data processing that Oracle specializes in (what I refer to as "monetary data", i.e. data which is either about money or mostly about money) is declining as a percentage of the customer's overall IT workload.

Don't get me wrong: Monetary data will never go away. As long as we humans keep crowding around planet Earth engaging in economic activity, that data is going to have to be tracked, taxed, reported, etc. So, no, Oracle is not going to go out of business anytime soon.

The fact remains, though, that monetary data is not the gig it used to be. When I started out in computing (way back in the early 80's) monetary data was the end-all-be-all of computing. There wasn't anything else.

Not so any more. Say hello to Big Data. One of the defining characteristics of Big Data is that each individual piece of data is relatively unimportant. Transactional reliability is not a big deal in most Big Data systems. The loss of a single piece of data is often tolerated with the understanding that we are simply tracking big trends.

What is important in Big Data is cost: the volume of the data is so huge, that the products used to manage it must do so very cost effectively, both in terms of licensing, as well as the load on computing devices. And Oracle (especially in the traditional software packages it has sold for years) falls short in this area. Oracle is relatively more expensive, both in terms of dollars and computing resources, than other open source alternatives.

Hence my worry: Will Oracle successfully transform itself into a Big Data company? Will Oracle be able to overcome its propensity to create very rugged, industrial-grade transactional systems, and embrace a looser, more cost-conscious approach?

Please let me know what you think the future holds here.