The tech industry is changing fast. If Hewlett-Packard is moving aggressively into the cloud space, Oracle can?t be far behind. Recently, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled the company?s broadest cloud strategy, and this is what he quoted, ?Almost seven years of relentless engineering and innovation plus key strategic acquisitions. An investment of billions. We are now announcing the most comprehensive cloud on the planet Earth. Most cloud vendors only have niche assets. They don?t have platforms to extend. Oracle is the only vendor that offers a complete suite of modern, socially-enabled applications, all based on a standards-based platform.? Rex Wang, who leads global cloud marketing, is vice-president of product marketing at Oracle. He says that Oracle today has over 100 applications on the cloud, and the company?s software-as-a-service alone is $1 billion-plus. In a recent interaction with Sudhir Chowdhary, he talks about the business strategy for increasing Oracle?s presence in the cloud. Excerpts:
Give us an overview of the cloud computing scenario in terms of adoption and business forecasts, going forward.
We see broad-based adoption of cloud solutions across all industries. Top industries include financial services, telecommunications and government/public sector, but we also see significant uptake in manufacturing, high technology, retail, healthcare and other verticals.
Based on our own surveys and third party analysis, we see significantly higher adoption of public and private clouds going forward. Among Oracle customers, 37% already have a private cloud, and 21% already use public clouds. The growth rate of public clouds (50% a year) is higher than that of private clouds (28% a year). Cloud has moved beyond the early adopter stage, progressing toward the mainstream at a rapid rate.
How is the cloud scenario shaping up in Asia Pacific region, especially in high growth markets like China and India?
Cloud adoption is significant in the US and Western Europe as well as in Asia Pacific and emerging markets. In each country, overall economic conditions and IT spending levels are important factors, but for cloud, so are broadband and mobile penetration, because clouds rely on high performance, reliable networks.
So overall size and growth favour countries like China and India. Regulations governing data privacy and protection can also be an important factor, since some countries require the clouds to be hosted within their borders.
How is Oracle?s cloud strategy unique or different as compared to other cloud service providers that have been around longer?
Oracle?s strategy is to provide the most comprehensive cloud in the industry in terms of breadth and depth of our solutions. In terms of breadth, most other cloud service providers have niche offerings in one application area or platform area, creating data, process fragmentation, requiring integration. Oracle is a cloud suite service provider. The Oracle Cloud offers unmatched breadth across a range of enterprise applications: ERP, HCM, Talent Management, Sales, Marketing, Customer Experience (CX). It also offers a broad range of platform services: Oracle Database, Java and six others.
The Oracle Cloud provides a portfolio of social services to enable businesses to engage with customers and collaborate using social networking. In terms of depth, the Oracle Cloud is based on integrated, optimised Oracle products from applications, standards-based middleware, database, OS, virtualisation, servers, storage. The Oracle Cloud runs on Exadata and Exalogic engineered systems. This depth provides full enterprise grade capability and makes Oracle the most expert, accountable for the full technology stack that?s delivering the cloud service. Other cloud service providers rely on components from other vendors, including Oracle. In fact, nine out of the top 10 SaaS providers in the world are powered by Oracle.
Why is Oracle aggressively promoting cloud now?
Oracle has been at the forefront of the cloud evolution with many innovations. With our long history of organic R&D investment, combined with acquisitions, we have now put it all together as a comprehensive cloud suite available to customers on a subscription basis. This is Oracle Cloud, and only Oracle offers this breadth and depth for customers.
How will this impact the industry at large and help customers simplify IT?
Cloud is an evolution of industry, datacentre and technology trends that have been happening for more than a decade. Cloud not only helps customers simplify IT, but also to improve business agility, speed and innovation. Cloud simplifies IT by offloading work to a service provider, and by standardising services and making the services more efficient. Cloud improves business agility, speed and innovation by shortening time to value, improving the ability of the system to adjust to workload fluctuations, and enabling the business to focus on competitive advantages and innovation instead of routine operations.
How does the Oracle Cloud fit into the hardware-software-engineered to work together theme that Oracle has been promoting for four years now?
The Oracle Cloud runs on engineered systems: Oracle Exadata Database Machine for data management and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud for the application and middle tier. These engineered systems deliver upwards of 10x better performance compared to conventionally integrated architectures. This translates to faster response times and higher throughput, and it also means greater efficiency and lower cost because more workload can run using less IT resources. In addition, Oracle makes these same engineered systems available to customers for their own data centers, so customers can get the same advantages for private use.
How can enterprises benefit from apps available in the cloud today to enhance their capabilities?
Oracle has over 100 enterprise application modules available in the cloud today in sales and marketing, customer experience, human capital management, talent management and enterprise resource planning. Enterprises can deploy the entire suite, but many are choosing to adopt new functionality, such as talent management, in the cloud and have it integrated as an extension of the existing HCM system which may be on premise.
This gives customers access to the new functionality very rapidly while minimising disruption to existing systems and processes. Using a phased approach, customers can replace aging, on premise applications with modern applications in the Oracle Cloud, but they can also continue to use existing applications while adopting new functionality in the Oracle Cloud.