Larry’s OOW Keynote on the future of Oracle Applications
Although there had been many analyst and Oracle ACE briefings for much of the preceding week, Sunday night was the ‘proper’ opening for Oracle OpenWorld 2014. It kicked off with Larry’s first keynote of the conference. (He traditionally does two, however skipped the second last year to watch the thrilling finale to the 2013 America’s Cup.)
His hour long address was given over exclusively to the cloud. Here’s a summary of the important points for those in the Oracle applications marketplace.
Layers of the Cloud
There are of course many layers within The Cloud … the Applications sit at the top level (Software as a Service), however there’s also the platform beneath this (Platform as a Service), and the infrastructure at the bottom (Infrastructure as a Service). Oracle is moving to being a company that can offer the complete stack of cloud services to the enterprise. Larry’s first big point was that Oracle is the only company that can do all three layers.
It’s an interesting – although to a certain degree, academic – point to debate. He said Salesforce only does the Application layer (he’s correct that they don’t have the infrastructure service layer, although I think that they would rightly argue that they have a large and mature platform layer – Salesforce1). He also said that Amazon just does the Infrastructure layer (although they would quite correctly argue that they also provide a platform layer).
The only companies that can come close to Oracle’s delivery in all three layers are Microsoft – they have Infrastructure (Azure) and Applications (Dynamics is now available in the cloud) but their PaaS offering is not as well known – and Google – who have infrastructure (Google Compute Engine) and Platform (Google Application Engine) however their SaaS offerings are Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs, rather than full-blown HCM or ERP offerings.
Platform in the Cloud
The newest of Oracle’s three offerings is the Platform layer. You can now move any database to Oracle’s database in the cloud service very simply. Furthermore, any Oracle application (or any Java application) that runs on top of an Oracle database can be moved to the cloud very simply too. This is apparently possible on Oracle’s upgraded 2014 platform. Larry’s also promised that these migrations can be done with just two button presses, which is a bold – many would say unbelievable – claim.
This platform supplies the building blocks with which any applications in the Oracle Cloud are built – whether they’re built by Oracle or by customers/partners. One of the points that Larry stressed again was that Oracle is the only vendor that gives end users the same platform to develop on that they use internally. Other vendors either have no platform service at all (Workday) or use different tools in-house (like Salesforce – who offer Salesforce1 to customers but use a different platform to develop the core application with in-house).
In what sounds like an entertaining session, during his second Keynote on Tuesday Larry has promised to both extend Fusion applications and perform the ‘two button migration’ in live demos. I think you should always get extra marks for demoing your own products, as many speakers usher someone else on-stage for this section – although as Larry is CTO now I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that he’s going it himself.
Infrastructure in the Cloud
Larry spoke briefly about Oracle’s IaaS offering. He skipped over a few of the slides quite quickly, I’m not sure if he was running short of time, however he made some interesting points. It still strikes me as unusual when he claims that Oracle will compete with Amazon and Google on price – as Oracle solutions are typically more towards the premium end of the price-scale – however it’ll be interesting to see how they get on in the commodity pricing marketplace.
Larry’s claim that “the Oracle Cloud is bigger than most people think” was certainly correct for me. They currently have 30,000 servers and serve 62,000,000 discrete users every day!
HCM in the Cloud
Larry stated that Oracle has long held the lead in Talent Management in the Cloud – he was clearly talking about Taleo here – however for the last two quarters Oracle has overtaken the competition and is now the top-seller in Core HR. This ties in with the information from the latest Oracle earnings call (in the last financial quarter Oracle sold Fusion HCM to 60 new customers, and during the same period Workday only added 25).
Larry believes that the reason that Oracle HCM Cloud is selling so well is that it’s got Social integrated. Benefits, Payroll etc. is “table stakes”, but the Social tools are important for what he calls 21st Century HCM.
ERP in the Cloud
Larry says that he is particularly proud of the Oracle ERP Cloud as it was built in-house. He says that Oracle is the first company to sell mid-market and high-end ERP in the cloud. Given that Oracle has only been really selling this for a touch over 12 months, this is an impressive logo slide:
He also mentioned that Oracle is selling EPM in the cloud – so they’ve moved Hyperion to the cloud – and claims that Oracle are the only company within an EPM in the Cloud offering.
Speed of Growth
Larry stated repeatedly that Oracle’s strategy is “build and buy” … some of Fusion has been developed in-house, other parts have been purchased. Of the parts that have been built in-house, this is the growth (or hyper-growth in Larry-speak) in the last 12 months:
He says that 2014 is an inflection point for Oracle in terms of selling these solutions. The fact that 19 out of the top 20 SaaS providers use the Oracle Database and Java is obviously something that Larry would enjoy (and the lone company that doesn’t – Workday – uses another Oracle Database – MySQL – for some of its back-end processing).
He also poked fun at SAP for their HANA powers the cloud slogan by asking “whose cloud does it power, because it doesn’t power theirs” (SuccessFactors, Ariba and Concur all run on Oracle).
Summary
In summary, despite stepping down from the CEO role Larry couldn’t resist opening the conference with a bang. There weren’t as many new product announcements as previous years, however he was able to shine a light on some strong progress and healthy sales traction across many product lines. It’s clear however, that the product lines that will get the most focus are ones with ‘cloud’ in the name. There wasn’t a single mention of PeopleSoft, eBusiness Suite or Siebel during the entire session.
Fusion Tipster 