It’s no wonder technology startups are by and large focusing on applications right now. First of all, customers are hungry for easy solutions that give them control over application development and deployment at the level of the application level itself. And the real draw for vendors is that once they capture a company’s applications, they can likely count on their loyalty, if only because app models are a lot of work to scrap and do over.

During Oracle OpenWorld 2016, John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, talked about how this app-centric climate affects legacy database company Oracle Corp.

“The apps business is sticky. When companies embed their applications or embed an application in their business, they reconfigure their entire organization around it — it’s hard to rip that out,” Burris said.

However, Oracle’s database business is nothing to sneeze at, Burris explained. “They are clearly number one and have been for a long time in the database marketplace — and it’s hard to pop the database out,” he said.

Tech athletes

Furrier said that Oracle has assets that give it the horsepower to stay competitive — namely its talent. “They’re putting their best technical people out front. Clearly talent matters, organic growth matters,” he said.

Furrier also commented that the company is offering a plethora of new products to solve problems facing the modern enterprise. “The announcement velocity here at Oracle OpenWorld is probably the most I’ve seen in seven years,” he said. Burris agreed and added that the announcements are not fluff, but heavy-lifting solutions for moving to cloud.

Fish or fowl?

Burris spoke about the need for Oracle and the industry as a whole to stay flexible in the face of Big Data’s shape-shifting.

“We still don’t know what I call the body plans or business models. We’re in this notion where we don’t know if it’s going to look like a fish or it’s going to look like a mouse or something else,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Oracle OpenWorld.

(* Disclosure: Oracle and other companies sponsor some OpenWorld segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Oracle nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE