We’re about to finish the first month of 2014 and all the predictions for Oracle are starting to show some facts but… this week at the first Oracle Cloud Conference in San Francisco made some comments that set old/new definitions for what can indicate a current competitor.
Back in December the key focus was set on database, cloud applications and engineered systems. Now, after Ellison’s presentation at the show this past week, it seems like the competition is no longer IBM and SAP.
This sounds weird, considering that Oracle is creating special tea
ms of CRM & ERP pre-sales trained on competition.
We understand that in a Cloud Conference it is necessary to talk of the small fast moving cloud service providers such as Expensify, Docusign, Avature and other that are some of the blockbusters of the cloud hemisphere. But wait, they are also featured apps in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace! The question here is: are they really competitors or business partners?
Let’s review how Oracle has been expanding on each an every cloud direction over the last few years and that creates partnerships and competitors all along the way.
There’s no discussion that in terms of platform, Oracle has a huge advantage among their competition by owning the two big brands: Oracle Database 12c and Java.
Oracle Database 12c is the leader and will continue to be on the on-premise world, and having it as a service it will definitely have a huge opportunity.
Oracle Java Cloud Services is also very competitive and with a starter Weblogic Server with 1.5Gb RAM 5GB file storage and 50Gb Data transfer at $249/month demonstrate the effectiveness.
The game changer at the infrastructure level will be the cost since Amazon and Azure are offering that service and of course the huge plus of having an Oracle product on an Oracle Cloud is unbeatable.
I’ve mentioning “cloud” many times and it’s very important to understand the different options and pillars of cloud. Over the time it is becoming a commodity and the clear benefits of that are in the decreasing cost. There are important aspects that need to be taken care of when jumping into the “cloud” such as:
- Understanding differences between Public vs. Private Cloud
- How you can start building your own cloud
- How to efficiently work on your Service Level Agreements with cloud providers
Finally what is called Software as a Service (SaaS) and on that arena Oracle has built a huge ecosystem with more applications than any other cloud service provider. The main drivers are Human Capital Management (HCM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) that you can purchase per user per month. Two years ago we started to talk about the fear factor of jumping into an application in the cloud and since then the customer base has increased constantly at double digits.
Playing a key role at the three pillars of the cloud offering: Platform, Infrastructure and Software, Oracle has started to add competitors and the change of focus from Ellison pointing out the IBM and SAP direction is definitely just a marketing play as Larry has us familiar with. And he knows how to play that game very well.