Rob Preston, editorial director in Oracle’s Content Central organization, wrote in Forbes about the advantage that Larry Ellison, Oracle Chairman and CTO, sees in Oracle’s combination of Cloud applications and infrastructure.

At Oracle OpenWorld 2019, Ellison explained that Oracle is uniquely positioned for growth in the enterprise Cloud application market segment, as it leverages the database, analytics, security, integration, and extensibility capabilities of its underlying Oracle Generation 2 Cloud Infrastructure. Oracle started rewriting all of its on-premises applications for the Cloud a dozen years ago and is already the No. 1 provider to Cloud-native ERP and human resources apps and the No. 2 provider of Cloud-native customer experience (CX – sales, marketing, customer service, and commerce) apps. In total, Oracle has more than 31,000 Cloud application customers.

Ellison went on to say that Oracle’s main application competitors – SAP and Workday in financials, Workday in HR applications, and Salesforce.com in CX – are limited by their lack of a robust Cloud infrastructure layer. On the flip side, of Oracle’s four main Cloud infrastructure competitors – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, and IBM – only Microsoft has a portfolio of Cloud enterprise applications.

He explained that in Cloud financials/ERP, the largest but mature enterprise Cloud application sector, Oracle has about 25,000 customers for its Fusion and Oracle NetSuite applications – compared with a few hundred for Workday.

SAP, Oracle’s biggest competitor in the on-premises ERP sector, acquired several Cloud applications companies over the years, but Ellison said they “somehow forgot to rewrite their applications for the Cloud.” Instead, SAP focused on developing a database called Hana to compete with Oracle’s leading database. Ellison thinks that the strategy that SAP has taken creates a huge opportunity for Oracle to do better.

Advantage of the Combination of Oracle Applications and Infrastructure

Ellison said that Oracle has more Cloud applications with more features than any other enterprise application provider – Cloud or on-premises. He said that Oracle continues to innovate – at both the application and infrastructure levels.

At Oracle OpenWorld 2019, Oracle announced:

• New Cloud-based processes, project, and mixed-mode manufacturing applications
• New machine learning-based digital assistant functionality in its Cloud ERP, HR, and CX applications
• An offering called CX Unity that combines internal and third-party data about customers
• New analytics capabilities, including a data warehouse that lets customers run analytics on their Fusion application data combined with outside data sources
• Integration of its Eloqua B2B marketing and Data Fox real-time business intelligence systems
• A modernized user interface, called Redwood, that the company will roll out across all of its Cloud applications

Ellison also explained that all of Oracle’s applications are either running on, or in the process of being moved to, the self-patching, self-tuning, self-updating Oracle Autonomous Database. He said that even very large companies are shedding any lingering doubts that they have about moving to Cloud-based applications.

“This is no longer the early days. This is a period we’re seeing of sudden acceleration, as we see customers wanting to modernize their systems, wanting to modernize their business practices, moving from older systems to modern Cloud systems. And again, we think it is a gigantic opportunity for us.”

-Larry Ellison, Oracle Chairman and CTO

Some of Oracle’s largest Cloud application customers include AT&T, Cox Communications, HSBC, Wells Fargo, Ford, BMW, Mack Trucks, McKesson, Duke University, Cummins, and Major League Baseball.

“The rate at which these systems are going in—from the time you sign the contract to the time you go live—is not lots of years. Now it’s lots of months. It is a big difference from the systems that came before. Even our systems go in much more quickly for much less money than our earlier on-premises systems.”

-Larry Ellison, Oracle Chairman and CTO