INDUSTRY INTERVIEW: Oracle
Jack Pellicci
Group Vice President
Business Development
North American Public Sector
Oracle
Q: Can you tell us about your background and current role in Oracle?
A: I was a career military officer for 30 years, retiring as a brigadier general in the Army. I was a combat arms officer, commanding at the infantry brigade and battalion level, but I also had a technology background, and served in a variety of technology assignments. In my last assignment, I was commanding general of the Army’s Personnel Information Systems Command, which supported the Army’s personnel systems globally.
After that, I transitioned to Oracle, where I’ve been for the past 14 years. During my time at Oracle, I have done strategic planning, business development and program management. But my “night job” was to continue promoting geospatial information management. I was really taken by what happened in Desert Storm, when our forces went around the Iraqi flank. We were in territory where the Iraqis would be lost for two weeks if they went there. But we had GPS, and everyone knew where they were all the time. That really impressed me, and when I joined Oracle I saw an opportunity to spatially enable our database.
I heard that there was a project going on then in Canada, where they were developing a spatial capability. I went there and found a group of people developing a spatial data management tool. I thought that was a good start, and was able to help move it to mainstream development, where Oracle could put its vast resources behind it. From 1994 to today, we have continued to develop our spatial products. We have a development team in Nashua, N.H., that develops our spatial products. They have a dedicated team focused on developing Oracle’s geospatial information management capability as part of our server technologies group, which focuses on the database and our application server (Oracle Fusion Middleware), which are now both spatially enabled.
Q: Where is Oracle heading in the future in its work with military customers?
A: We’re working to help the military make geospatial data more available to both warfighting and business systems across an enterprise. Oracle’s strength is in geospatially-enabling an enterprise. We hear a lot about GIS systems, but I’ve found that there are a lot of stovepipes out there. You’ve got to have an enterprise capability. For example, if you want to use geospatial data across the enterprise, in multiple systems rather than just GIS systems, then you have to take a different view. Right now, the military is moving raster imagery into Oracle Spatial in the database, versus a flat file approach. If you look at the military and many corporations today, you’ll see the flat file approach, which is very inefficient. Using a spatially enabled relational database makes it a lot more efficient, secure and capable.
We’re also seeing a very strong linkage between sensor-based computing, including radio frequency identification and geospatial information management. We’re helping to location-enable sensor information to provide actionable intelligence.
Q: What do you see as some of the key technology issues facing the military today?
A: The military faces an ever-changing environment, and needs to be able to deploy COTS applications and technology that can be used with standard interfaces. These need to be able to handle massive amounts of data without causing an information overload for the military decision makers. The military has to acquire, access, store and distribute geospatial information with a greater security than ever before, calling for the integration of multi-level security capabilities.
Also, the military is increasingly using three-dimensional surfaces and models to support combat operations. So there is a critical need to store and manage three-dimensional geospatial data. In our next release, we are planning to provide the ability to manage three-dimensional geospatial data. That’s going to be a tremendous capability for the military.
Finally, another major challenge is sharing geospatial data among a large number of military systems and users. So making the spatial data used by one system understandable by another not only requires a common data model, but also a knowledge of the syntax. When one set of users says, “friendlies,” another says, “blue forces,” and a third says, “ours,” we need semantic technologies to help them. We have an effort underway on semantic data integration for the enterprise, which will be very helpful. You will have the ability to manage spatial information in conjunction with all the other information, so that it is understandable from system to system.
Oracle has been dedicated to spatial information management for more than 13 years, and geospatially enabling the enterprise is our mantra—from the database, to the application server, to the enterprise applications. Spatially enabling ERP applications is an important effort that we are emphasizing. In summary, our customers, especially the military, have asked us to help them acquire, store, manage and use geospatial information efficiently and securely, and that’s what we’re doing. ♦
