I am glad I was part of a (virtual) fireside chat yesterday with Mark Hurd and Thomas Kurian on the Oracle Cloud before I read Bob Evans’ indignant post on Forbes which has the tone of “when is the world finally going to credit us for a cloud that supports 10,000 paying customers and 25 million users?”
Mark and Thomas marched through a series of offerings in the Oracle cloud including some that have been talked about for a while
- Database of choice for many SaaS vendors
- Fusion apps available in cloud deployment mode
and several growing areas
- ‘burst capacity” via its Infrastructure as a service
- platform – database and Java – as a service
- growing network of cloud data centers around world
- social and marketing apps
During Q&A I asked Mark if he was concerned about the market perception that larger vendors are “cloudwashing” when their cloud revenues and their cloud infrastructure capex are still puny. Posts on this blog in the last couple of weeks provide some examples.
I asked him if Oracle would report more comprehensive cloud numbers any time soon given the investment and traction represented in the bullets they had discussed. He was non-committal beyond the “cloud software subscriptions revenues” number which Oracle is already disclosing.
I understand taking that step would mean more definition statements of what is “cloud” , auditor signoffs, showing of comparative numbers from previous periods etc.
But think how much more impactful they would be than claims of 25 million users. And think of the pressure it would put on competitors to disclose similar numbers.
