Oracle’s Larry Ellison pointed fingers at its competitors and said that they cannot keep pace with Oracle's speed and expertise in developing applications.
At the Oracle OpenWorld, the Executive Chairman and CTO said in his keynote that Oracle has been rewriting all of its applications for the cloud from scratch in the last 13 years and this makes it different from all other suites provided by the competition.
“Each application is engineered to work with each other and our Fusion Cloud application suite is engineered to run on Generation 2 cloud platform. We have three suites of cloud applications – ERP, HCM and CX. We have more applications, more features and more functions than any other suite of applications in the cloud or on-premises,” he said.
Generation 1 cloud places user code and data on the same computers as the cloud control code with shared CPU, memory, and storage while Generation 2 cloud puts customer code, data, and resources on a bare-metal computer, while cloud control code lives on a separate computer with a different architecture, apart from autonomous, integration and analytics capabilities.
Ellison said the combination of Fusion apps and NetSuite makes Oracle as the number one in Cloud ERP with 25,000 customers while Workday, in the second place, has a few hundred Cloud ERP customers. “We have a large market share and increasing the market share for the last couple of years,” he said.
Moreover, he said that Oracle has overtaken Workday in human capital management cloud customers and behind its primary competitor Salesforce in customer experience applications,” he said.
A true cloud infrastructure
Ellison proudly claimed that Oracle has the most complete suite of front- and back-office applications, all of it written specifically for the cloud and taking advantage of the Generation 2 cloud platform.
“Oracle is investing very heavily in building new applications, building new technologies to enhance those applications,” he said.
Pointing fingers at Salesforce, SAP and Workday, he said that they do not have cloud infrastructure to build apps while Oracle’s Fusion apps are built on a true cloud infrastructure.
“When we acquired NetSuite, it had multi-tenancy capabilities built into its applications but that is not the right place for multi-tenancy capabilities. Salesforce has multi-tenancy capabilities on its applications. Now, as NetSuite is on our Gen 2 Cloud, they are taking multi-tenancy capabilities out of the applications, so it is fully secured. NetSuite will use the multi-tenant capabilities of the underlying database instead.
“We have a true cloud. We have storage, compute, autonomous database and machine learning. We can compete with Amazon, Google or Microsoft but they are not our competitors in the enterprise application space,” he said.
Growing from strength to strength
Ellison gave credit to Salesforce for building its applications from the ground-up, specifically for the cloud.
“They were very early and doing this for a long time. They put multi-tenancy into the applications business and that is all they could do. Salesforce has built some kind of capability to allow people to write small programmes or through extensibility platform called Force.com. But Force.com is highly propriety, limited functionality and just extensions. But they have and built it out of necessity,” he said.
Workday, which also built their applications specifically for the cloud, has no capability like Force.com and no underline cloud facility, he said; but Workday is way better than SAP which somehow forgot to write their applications for the cloud.
However, he said that what SAP is trying to do is convincing customers to replace Oracle databases with its HANA technology, but has not updated the actual applications built on HANA for the cloud era and their multi-cloud applications are 35-year old code and nothing is rewritten.
“SAP has no cloud ERP applications and no cloud platform and that is a huge opportunity for us. Thanks, SAP for doing that,” he said.
Showing some statistics, he said that Oracle has 31,000 cloud application customers as of the fiscal year 2019 compared to 29,000 in the fiscal year 2018, at a growth rate of 339% in five years and 106% growth in the number of apps cloud products over the past five years.