SAN FRANCISCO—Oracle is uniquely positioned for growth in the enterprise cloud application market segment, as it leverages the database, analytics, security, integration, and extensibility capabilities of its underlying Oracle Generation 2 Cloud Infrastructure, Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison said during his second keynote at Oracle OpenWorld.
Oracle, which started rewriting all of its on-premises applications for the cloud a dozen years ago, already is the #1 provider of cloud-native ERP and human resources apps and the #2 provider of cloud-native customer experience (CX—sales, marketing, customer service, and commerce) apps, Ellison said. In total, Oracle has more than 31,000 cloud application customers, he said.
Meantime, Oracle’s main application competitors—SAP and Workday in financials, Workday in HR apps, and Salesforce.com in CX—are limited by their lack of a robust cloud infrastructure layer, Ellison said during his September 18 keynote. On the flip side, of Oracle’s four main cloud infrastructure competitors—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, and IBM—only Microsoft has a portfolio of cloud enterprise applications.
In cloud financials/ERP, the largest but least mature enterprise cloud application sector, Oracle has about 25,000 customers for its Fusion and Oracle NetSuite apps, compared with a few hundred for Workday, Ellison said.
SAP, Oracle’s biggest competitor in the on-premises ERP sector, acquired several cloud applications companies over the years “but somehow forgot to rewrite their applications for the cloud,” he said. Instead, SAP focused on developing a database, called Hana, to compete with Oracle’s leading database, Ellison said, effectively telling customers: “We want you to move to the same old applications you had before, but now they’re running on Hana,” he said “…They don’t have cloud ERP applications, and they certainly don’t have a cloud platform. We think that’s a huge opportunity for us. Thank you, SAP, for doing that.”