Oracle CEO Hurd Stays Ellison's Course

No vendor is bigger, broader, or better than Oracle. That's the message Oracle CEO Mark Hurd sent at Oracle OpenWorld on Monday as he rattled off impressive numbers, chatted with big customers, talked up the company's size and scope, and declared the company to be on track.

"We feel great about our strategy, we feel great about our product portfolio, we feel great about our position in the market, and we have one focus, and that's winning," Hurd said, dismissing a suggestion that the company's direction might change now that he and Safra Catz have taken over the CEO role from Larry Ellison.

By the numbers, Oracle has announced 173 new SaaS applications this year, including 32 in vertical industries, 29 in marketing, 20 in supply chain, 16 in human capacity management (HCM) cloud, and 14 in enterprise resource planning (ERP). There's an all-new Analytics Cloud offering that will bring reporting and real-time analysis to the HCM, ERP, and customer-experience clouds. Oracle now claims 62 million users and 23 billion transactions per day in the cloud. It recently added two new cloud data centers in Germany (SAP's home turf), bringing its global total to 19 in eight countries.

[Want more on Oracle OpenWorld 2014? Read Oracle CTO Ellison Claims Cloud Supremacy.]

Hurd chatted onstage with innovative CIOs hailing from giant companies including Walgreens, GE, Procter & Gamble, Xerox, and Intel. "The common thread is that they're all big companies, they have big legacy environments, and they need to innovate and transform by moving to the cloud," said Hurd. "They know Oracle is a serious partner who can help them do just that."

What Hurd didn't mention, but more than one CIO let slip out, is that they're also working with Oracle's rivals. GE, for example, uses Salesforce.com apps and has invested more than $100 million in big data and cloud infrastructure rival Pivotal. Walgreens, Procter & Gamble, Xerox, and Intel also work with Salesforce.com.

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd.

What's more, on closer inspection, some of this week's cloud announcements could be interpreted as catch-up moves. In the public sector and educational market, for example, Oracle announced new cloud-based grants-management and accounting features of the kind rival Workday announced back in 2012. In the customer experience arena, Oracle announced a Data-as-a-Service for Sales offering that sounds strikingly similar to the Data.com service based on Salesforce.com's 2010 acquisition of Jigsaw. In enterprise performance management (EPM), cloud-based vendors like Adaptive Insights and Host Analytics have been poaching Oracle Hyperion customers for years (and SAP, too, has stepped up with cloud offerings), yet 2014 marked Oracle's launch of its EPM cloud.

Is Oracle simply responding to rivals like Salesforce.com, Workday, and SAP in established cloud markets, or are there areas of the cloud where Oracle is innovating on its own? InformationWeek put that question to Hurd during a

Next Page

1 of 2