Over the past several months, we’ve published a number of pieces in this space about Oracle’s adventures in the wild, wild world of cloud computing. We’ve touched in the business value the cloud can create, the profound impact the cloud is having within companies and across entire industries, and the vast potential the cloud offers for liberating IT dollars to fund innovation.
Along the way, I’ve tried to spell out Oracle’s cloud strategy as described by Larry Ellison, Mark Hurd, and Thomas Kurian, and have also called out some ways that Oracle’s unique approach to cloud computing have been misconstrued, misinterpreted, and misrepresented.
And as our 10-city Oracle CloudWorld rolling thunder roadshow nears its end with stops in Mexico City, London, and Munich over the next 10 days, the time seems right to offer an overview of where Oracle stands with its cloud-computing approach and why it’s completely unlike what any other cloud vendor is attempting to offer. And our first item touches on one of the most-pressing and -strategic issues facing CIOs today.
1) The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2013: Sitting at the very top of this list is the cloud and its potential to help companies shift their IT spending away from infrastructure and integration and toward innovation, revenue growth, and customer engagement. Unless CIOs and their colleagues can get this IT-spending ratio under control, their companies will be unable to fund innovative new initiatives, and their ability to compete will decline. And cloud computing is the best way to begin attacking that problem.
2) The Cloud Revolution and Creative Destruction. As we wrote in this piece, “That’s the central issue: what customers are doing with cloud solutions, how they’re able to free up more funding for growth and innovation, and how they’re able to adapt more rapidly and effectively to life in our customer-driven world. We’ll begin to see the real the real creative-destruction power of the cloud unleashed when we begin to define the cloud in terms of what business customers want and need, and when we stop diddling around with inside-baseball constructs that mean little or nothing to the businesspeople who are ready to spend many tens of billions of dollars on cloud solutions that focus on and deliver business value.” Next up is a new and dangerous threat to cloud computing:
3) The New and Dangerous Threat to Cloud Computing. “No, the biggest threat to cloud-computing companies today is customer fatigue. Businesses are tired of hearing the tech industry squawk about whether this or that is a managed service or a faux cloud or a virtualized cumulonimbus cluster or a passing shower or black cloud of doom. They are tired of hearing what the NIST’s definition of a cloud is or isn’t, and whether the solution that’s best for their global systems does or does not comply with the definitions of some self-appointed experts whose only certainty is that they’ll capriciously change their definitions to match the prevailing winds.”
4) Larry Ellison Doesn’t Get the Cloud: The Dumbest Idea of 2013. Oracle’s cloud revenue is about $1 billion, but Oracle’s founder doesn’t get the cloud? Oracle began rewriting all of its software for the cloud 8 years ago, but Larry Ellison doesn’t get the cloud? Oracle has more cloud-ready applications than any other pure-play or boutique SaaS player, but Larry Ellison doesn’t get the cloud? Oracle is the only IT vendor that plays at every layer of the cloud stack—SaaS, Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), but its CEO doesn’t get the cloud? With almost 8 full months to go, I remain 100% confident that when the final list of the year’s dumbest ideas are compiled, this canard will retain its spot at the top of that list.
5) Oracle Cloud Success Triggers Oracle-Derangement Syndrome. Some of the cognoscenti don’t know quite to make of Oracle’s cloud approach because the company doesn’t fit into their prepackaged compartments: in addition to SaaS apps, Oracle also does on-premise apps and lets customers switch back and forth because the apps are built on the same code base. And because Oracle plays at all levels of the cloud stack, some commentators contort that into some sort of illegitimate or faux-cloud approach because what Oracle’s doing doesn’t line up with some definition of cloud computing that appears somewhere on Wikipedia or the NIST website. While Oracle holds both of those entities in high esteem, we’re going to continue basing our cloud strategies and products on what customers want and need and not on some arcane and increasingly irrelevant theoretical constructs.
6) Oracle Cloud Tops 10,000 Customers and 25 Million Users. Pretty impressive numbers—and they’re from 3-1/2 months ago.
7) Dear CIO: Is The Time Bomb In Your IT Budget About To Explode? Here’s an excerpt: “Plus, there’s also a growing sense among CEOs that their CIOs should be finding brilliant new ways to morph from being a cost center to being a revenue generator (as noted in a recent column called The CIO as Revenue Rainmaker: 7 Excellent Examples). But of all those pressures and stresses, the one that should be top of mind is the tick-tick-tick of the IT-budget time bomb—because unless you address it meaningfully and permanently, you won’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting after those other priorities because you simply won’t have the funding to support them.” And if you believe cloud is the right approach, here's some powerful support for that argument from McKinsey:
8) Cloud Industry Rockets Toward $100 Billion; McKinsey Bullish. The move to the cloud is gaining steam across all sizes of companies and across all industries, and the best is yet to come: “In a bullish report in McKinsey Quarterly called Protecting information in the cloud , the management-consulting firm made several compelling arguments about the rise of the cloud as an enterprise approach whose time has come.”
9) Oracle Execs to Wall Street: We Got the Cloud. From an all-day meeting with financial analysts in October, Oracle co-presidents Safra Catz and Mark Hurd offered those observations about the company’s cloud prospects: Safra Catz: “This is the most modern product line – the broadest product line in the world, okay? We’re pretty optimistic. Now, I’m not going to give you numbers of where this is going to go, but we’re talking about over 100 modules. . . . And this has been really very, very warmly received. It’s gone really well, and we’re very optimistic.”
Mark Hurd: “To Safra’s point, we also – these competitors we have are point-product competitors. And to the point she raised, we’re the only one with a suite of capability, which I’m telling you, long run, as much as many of you want to talk about these little boutique players that are out there, companies not only have to look at these things vertically, they have to look at them horizontally and how they work together. And being the first mover with cloud-SaaS apps on a suite of capability, is going to be a huge a differentiator for us out there.”
RECOMMENDED READING:
10 Reasons Software On Silicon Redefines Enterprise Computing
You Can Get A Chip Slower Than The New Sparc T5, You Just Have To Pay More
Oracle's Secret Sauce: Why Exadata Is Rocking the Tech Industry
Why Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Is So Bullish on Sun Hardware
The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2013
Steve Jobs, The $60 Light Bulb, And The Future Of Technology
The Strategic CIO Agenda 2013: Strategies, Priorities, and Career-Killers
