Oracle's Next Quest
"Our expertise has always been running the hardest, most complex jobs," Barron's quote Oracle CEO Safra Catz, in a extensive cover page article. Oracle is one of those rare companies who is a market leader in Business Applications (such as CRM, ERP, HCM, EPM or industry vertical applications, whether running on-premises or as SaaS). At the same time, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a public cloud offering that is recognized by Gartner in its yearly Magic Quadrant (along with AWS, Azure, GCP and IBM).
According to Safra Catz, "Our customers benefit because our applications make our infrastructure better and our makes our applications better." Oracle sells its products and services as b2b and not as b2c.
Public cloud has turned the enterprise computing into a utility, just like phone, water or electricity, where the consumer pays for the use often on a monthly basis. Oracle's shift to cloud has three major elements:
- Autonomous Database (ADB), that makes RDBMS (databases) more intelligent by use of Artificial Intelligence, to automate security, backups, patching and other routine tasks. ADB can be used in Cloud@Customer or Dedicate Regions where the "cloud" can run in customer's datacenter.
- The Enterprise Applications like Cloud ERP, HCM and NetSuite, covers the whole spectrum from large global enterprises to SMB sector (NetSuite).
- OCI offers public cloud and customers like Zoom and 8x8 have been a good testimonial of the public cloud services.
Oracle has a strong history of acquisitions namely NetSuite, BEA, Sun Microsystems, Hyperion, Siebel, PeopleSoft etc.