Here I am in Cleveland, Ohio surrounded by more than a thousand professionals from the world of higher education who are PASSIONATE about analytics. This is the world of universities and colleges and those who are responsible for reporting on institutional effectiveness, developing analytic insights regarding enrollment and recruiting, and serving a diverse and highly educated set of stakeholders. The major topics and points of emphasis have convinced me that Oracle Analytics and Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse are focused on the right capabilities and features.

• Everyone needs to integrate and manage large amounts of data from a wide variety of sources.
• Self-service and ad hoc analytics are hot topics. Every campus has a crowd of data smart people, but they’re spending all their time redoing the drudge work rather than finding insights.
• Data visualization and storytelling are extremely important. Interactive tools rather than static reports.
• Built-in machine learning is very important.
• More people talking about centralization of data standards and security.

Oracle Autonomous Database, combined with Oracle Analytics, hits all of these marks. The challenge is just getting the word out about these capabilities and selling them. I’m here doing my part! 😊 Gayle Fink of Bowie State University and I presented today on Dreams Do Become Reality: An Institution’s Decision-Support Journey, demonstrating a system that Vlamis built and is now extending for Bowie Sate University that uses ADW and OAC to accomplish that goal.