In two seperate venues this week I saw Oracle execs, Thomas Kurian (in front of customers) and Steve Miranda (in front of analysts) passionately and articulately talk about cloud computing.
Thomas talked about the speed clouds bring citing a Herbalife 10,000+ employee Fusion HRM project which from contract signing to live took 5 weeks including the intervening Christmas break. He talked about the 4 upgrade releases a year as another indication of agility that comes from a cloud solution. He talked about shared service efficiencies in the cloud - supporting 4,800 database customers with just 6 employees.
Steve talked about the robustness of the Fusion products to support over 100,000 employees at Schneider Electric and comprehensiveness of Fusion for multi-currency accounting and global tax and stautory reporting.
And while Oracle gets maligned for the slow Fusion rollout or being late to the cloud infrastructure market, Steve is content Oracle is on a $ 1 billion a year cloud run rate (helped by acquisitions like RightNow, Taleo, Eloqua and others). Thomas says the IaaS market is still young - Amazon has barely generated lifetime revenues of $ 1 billion from AWS.
But unlike other cloud vendor executives, they just as stoutly defend on-premise computing and private networks and Oracle's continued support for Sun gear, PeopleSoft, Siebel and other products. It's the customer's choice, they keep saying.
Listening to them it hit me that Ashton Eaton, winner of the 2012 Olympics decathlon, could probably give Usain Bolt a run for the money if he only ran the 100 and 200 metres but he prefers to compete in a wider set of events.
It reminded me of Alfred Sloan who took GM in a very different direction in the 1920s as he segmented the market with "a car for every purse and purpose" against Ford which stuck to its single Model T model.
I did ask Thomas how Oracle's cloud would be insulated from the "innovator's dillemma" that has plagued cloud offerings at SAP, IBM and other large vendors.
He says their cloud is more comprehensive. They are the only vendor to offer SaaS, PaaS and IaaS = building consensus across Oracle. They have not gone down market with their cloud offerings. And finally, their CEO has been an early cloud fan (and an early investor in Salesforce and NetSuite)
Many analysts would prefer Oracle put its full weight behind the cloud. I guess it is important to remember while Usain gets plenty of buzz, it is Ashton who holds the title of "world's greatest athlete" the title traditionally reserved for Olympic decathlon winners.
