Dubai: Oracle, like other technology peers, is betting big on cloud computing as it transits from a hardware supplier and developer to a complete cloud solutions provider.
Even though cloud offerings posted a robust growth of 140 per cent in the second quarter, Oracle’s dominance in the database market is not exactly leading to its dominance in the cloud space as it still accounts for around five per cent of overall revenues.
“Our strategy in cloud is working and we are going to invest more. We had a tremendous growth in cloud offerings in the Middle East. We have added 300 new and expansion software as a service [SaaS] cloud customers in the first quarter and second quarter,” said Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, who was in Dubai on Tuesday.
“We are in a very early innings and in a transition phase. The second quarter SaaS growth was 80 per cent in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA),” he said.
EMEA contributed 41 per cent to the group’s growth.
He said that Oracle is the only software provider in the industry with suite of SaaS applications and “we believe that companies are not going to have cloud applications from 20 different companies. Our differentiation is both in individual app but also the app works in suite of apps.”
Hurd sees Oracle to become a cloud leader but did not give a time frame, but is confident of achieving $1 billion cloud sales this year.
According to IT Candor, Amazon leads the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) space with a 10 per cent market share while Salesforce dominates the platform as a service (PaaS) like Linus and Java, and SaaS space.
“Our competitors in SaaS are totally different from PaaS. The combination of PaaS and SaaS work hand in hand. Our offerings are now competitively priced as Amazon.com and other infrastructure providers,” he said.
The demand for Unix-based servers is heading southward and Oracle hardware revenue was up just one per cent in second quarter and lags behind software and services, many analysts have said that it may sell its hardware business.
When asked, he said that oracle is gaining market share and grew in the second quarter.
“We are going to keep it and going to invest in it by transitioning from stand-alone servers to integrated platforms. Our competitors have reported double-digit negative growth,” he said.