Oracle does a good job keeping us informed on the growing breadth of its SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and DaaS offerings throughout the year – see my post on Hurricane Oracle in January. So, I wondered if I would learn much new on its Media Day on Thursday. Quite a bit actually given the interesting format they adopted.
CEO Mark Hurd made himself available in three separate sessions, including a live taping of a Recode podcast with Kara Swisher, who asked him a series of uncomfortable questions, which he handled well, and with a sense of humor. CMO Judy Sim gave the group a tour of the Oracle campus. There was Star Wars paraphernalia in the room to celebrate May the 4th. The lunch was served outside and celebrated Cinco the Mayo (minus the adult beverages). So, the day was relaxed and the executives fairly open.
Every body in the room got a slightly different update on Oracle’s cloud portfolio. We learned it is streamlining its cloud contracting process to allow startups like Lyft to make it easier to do business with. Made us wonder, in contrast, how many attorneys were involved with AT&T which announced a broad ranging cloud relationship that day around its exabyte of data sets.
Several international journalists benefited from having Jason Maynard, CMO of NetSuite on a panel as they looked to understand its global expansion plans. I benefited from listening to Andrew Mendelsohn discuss why Oracle is so intensely focused on Amazon. I enjoyed Dave Donatelli’s session on six paths customers are taking to move their infrastructure to the Oracle cloud. I would love to see other Oracle units and other cloud vendors spend more time talking about migration paths to the cloud. As Hurd told Swisher we are still in early innings in the cloud game” with may be 5% of the on-premise enterprise annual spend of trillion dollars in the cloud.
It is always a breathtaking to hear Thomas Kurian march through in an hour the hundreds of SKUs that make up Oracle’s cloud .
A day is not enough to get in to too much detail on the portfolio, but I thought it was a useful refresher on a wide range of topics.
The hurricane continues to strengthen and meander.
