Oracle is big and mighty and Oracle is evolving to stay relevant at the forefront for many years to come. This is the message you get if you happen to pass by the Metreon today to watch a movie, shop at the Westfield mall in San Francisco or travel across the world to have an exhilarating technological experience, one that is saturated with knowledge, fun and entertainment. Red Oracle banners, Oracle red buses and yes Oracle/BMW racing boats are occupying the city this week.
On Sunday, the opening day, outside on Howard Street, drums maracas and tambourines roared loud in the crisp San Francisco skies announcing Oracle Open World as attendees from all over the world mingled, ate, drank, danced and marveled at the might of the Oracle empire dominating the city of San Francisco for the annual conference.
Inside in Moscone North, the atmosphere was no less intense. Oracle’s message to SAP and IBM was loud and clear. They are nowhere in the cloud competition. Cloud has changed the rules of the game, and Oracle is confident of winning. Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison says Oracle’s competition in apps nowadays is with Salesforce and Workday. In platforms, its with Microsoft and not IBM anymore. And in Infrastructure, with Amazon not IBM or EMC.
Larry challenges Salesforce and Workday in the competition for dominating the cloud application market. Oracle plans to sell 50% more SaaS business than Salesforce. He elaborates with the following Oracle Cloud Design Goals that puts Oracle at an advantage:
- Lower acquisition cost and lowest total cost of ownership. Larry affirms oracle will match or beat amazon web services prices.
- Highest reliability, fault tolerant, and zero downtime.
- Highest performance: Contrary to the common conception, better performance means best cost performance.
- Open standards: Oracle uses open standard platforms that don’t lock in customers. Whereas Salesforce utilizes a proprietary platform while Workday doesn’t even have a platform Larry claimed.
- Compatibility between different clouds: This entails support of on premise to cloud migration of workloads. Larry foresees a long period of transition that spans 1 or 2 decades while on premise computing remains relevant. A solution designed with compatibility in mind allows for the coexistence between on-prem and cloud applications. Oracle’s design of using identical software in both private and public cloud allows for this live migration at the push of a button.
- Security: This is no longer an option. It should not be switched on and off. In Cloud its always on. Security is pushed all the way down the tech stack to the hardware. Larry’s Tuesday keynote will delve into the details of the Secure Oracle Cloud.
