Oracle People iPhone App Metrics

By Jake • February 24th, 2009 • View Comments

Yesterday, I promised to share the Pinch Media metrics Clayton has collected for the Oracle People iPhone app.

Here’s a snapshot.

Pinch Media metrics for the Oracle People app

There are 30 new users since yesterday, which seems like a nice growth rate to me. Clayton mentioned over OraTweet yesterday that adoption was slower than he anticipated. Based on the comments left here and direct email I’ve been getting, the demand seems about right so far.

We don’t have a good way to measure the number of Oracle employees sporting iPhones, but I’ve heard it’s somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000. That’s a pretty generous range, and frankly, I have no idea how reliable those numbers are.

Correct me in comments.

The only thing close to a measure I have is the Connect “Have an iPhone?” group, which has 1,000+ members, still not that dependable. Anyway, there are a lot iPhones out there.

The app meets a very useful unit of work, so maybe Clayton has a point. That unit of work is the one where you’re away from your computer and need contact information for someone. I’d hazard a guess that use case has or will come up at least once for every iPhone user who works for Oracle.

This assumption is confirmed by the data too. According to the metrics, the most common action is PersonDetailView, which means looking at someone’s profile. It’s significantly more common than EnterPassword (#2) and PerformSearch (#3).

This says to me that the app is living up to its name.

Anyway, I love data pr0n, so I figured I’d share it with you.

Do you use the Oracle People app? What do you think of it? What do you think it’s missing?

Sound off in comments.


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  • Maybe my disappointment was a sneaky ploy to motivate people to go download the app. If so, it didn't work. :-)

    That said, my take on why the numbers are what they are:

    1. Not everyone needs this kind of information away from their desk, plus many people generally spend most of their time with a lot of the same people. I don't have the stats to back it up, but would wager that the field has a much higher adoption rate than the product organization.

    2. All that extra password entry probably detracts from some of the friendliness that might make someone more strongly recommend it. It's certainly a deterrent to more active use with some of the connect/oratweet related features.

    3. The installation process isn't as simple for Enterprise apps as it is for App Store downloads. It requires a little more thought and effort to locate, download, unzip, and install via iTunes than to do a one-click install through the app store over-the-air.

    4. I find that many enterprise users sync with iTunes installed on a home computer, so it takes some thought outside the office to make the installation happen. Would be nice to have an OTA install mechanism for enterprise apps.

    5. I haven't really promoted the software in more general channels. If they hadn't joined a particular mailing list or visited the connect group, they're much less likely to have heard about it. I'd wager that there's a very big chunk of overlap between users in the Connect iPhone group and users of the app.

    Clayton
  • Yeah, I forgot to mention that there hasn't been mainstream publicity of the app, which contributes to the numbers. I think 1,000+ users is pretty good considering the lack of promotion.

    Your points are solid. I feel like this app is a JIC app, one you keep for that emergency situation. Sure, the Connect stuff is awesome, but it's really gravy. I hope we can improve it in the future.
  • Use it, love it, want some more of it. The only thing I can think of that I would add is a quick way to look up the daily guest wireless password. It would be really handy for meetings sometimes.
  • Tim Armitage
    Couldn't agree more - I was stuck in an office last week with only my iPhone and nobody about to give me the guest password.
  • I still think this is a separate app, rather than part of Clayton's app. It just feels like additional overhead that's not related to the app.

    Not debating the utility of it though.
  • That would be pretty hard to pull off based on the current way they broadcast that password. I would also categorize that as a separate unit of work, requiring a separate app.

    Why do you need wi-fi, I thought 3G was twice as fast :)
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