Oracle aims to benefit the most as customers shift from on-premise to cloud

Oracle aims to become the top revenue earner and number one cloud provider when organisations start moving from on-premises to the cloud, a top official said.

Speaking in an exclusive to TechRadar Middle East, Steve Miranda, Executive Vice-President for applications product development at Oracle, said SaaS [software as a service] will play a big role in the digital transformation and provide innovation faster to the customers.

“Whether you believe Oracle or not, the market is speaking for itself. From a SaaS perspective, we have the best apps for enterprises on the cloud,” he said.

The US software giant, with decades of database software and technologies and has strong penetration in the enterprise space, is gearing up for the next growth phase in cloud services.

Miranda said that Oracle is already the number one ERP (enterprise resource planning) provider in the cloud by a large margin but the vendor with the true SaaS applications are going to be most successful and “we feel that we have that and we have demonstrated it through thousands of customers,” he said.

“As people start moving to the cloud from the traditional on-premises, we are clear that we will overtake everyone in the industry and become the number one cloud provider in the market,” he said.

Both SAP and Oracle, biggest ERP providers, are flexing their muscles to be the world’s number one apps provider.

SAP has huge followers on on-premise ERP while Oracle has a strong presence in the cloud.

Looking at the ERP market, he said that it is quite fragmented and with Oracle and SAP at the top.

Market is for SaaS

Going forward, Miranda said the market is for SaaS and Oracle has the lead in the market.

Miranda said that Oracle took a very different approach to the ERP in the cloud.

First, he said that Oracle built the Fusion ERP cloud from the ground up and took a lot of critics from the industry and the people for doing that.

“It is built and it is very successful and a lot of people are moving into that with a complete suite of applications. SAP did it through a variety of suite of acquisitions and that is not fully integrated and not into the cloud.

“On the one side, we have Oracle as the true cloud and SAP with partial solutions and not a true cloud.

Second, "we are committed to our customers. If you are happy with your on-premise solutions, we will support you and when you are ready, we will help you to move forward.

“SAP took a very different approach. They did not build the product but has set a deadline for its customers to move to the cloud,” he said.

SAP has set a deadline, by 2025, for its legacy ERP customers to consider moving to cloud offerings.

“We have two different approaches now but we feel that we have a more customer-centric approach by showing them [customers] value and showing how and when to move as opposed to what other competitors have shown to force the issue,” he said.

Oracle’s CTO and Chairman Larry Ellison had said at its Fusion ERP will be the lever that ultimately dislodges SAP from the number one spot.

“SAP has set a deadline and customers who have the deadline have to take a look at all the SaaS solutions very seriously and when they evaluate, we hope to gain from the move to the cloud,” Miranda said.

He said that out of the 6,000 ERP customers in the Oracle cloud today, two-thirds are already live.

According to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, Oracle ERP is in the leader category for the last three years while SAP is in the visionaries’ category.

Making headway in IaaS

Oracle's cloud-related success mostly lays with SaaS applications, so Oracle is focusing on improving its base in IaaS [infrastructure as a service] with its autonomous cloud database.

To become a leader in an autonomous cloud database, Oracle needs to become a big player in IaaS but Miranda said that as Oracle flourishes in the autonomous database, “we will become a much big player in the infrastructure business as people will start to move their workloads to take advantage of the autonomous database.

“I don’t think that people have to come to the IaaS and utilise our autonomous database but people are coming to grow our infrastructure business. We strongly believe that from an infrastructure perspective, we now have the data centres and the technology to manage people’s cloud workloads very successfully. We do that by an autonomous database which allows to us pull out the best performance and best security at a lower cost,” he said.

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