Dubai: It’s no secret that Oracle was late into the cloud computing market but it claims it is the fastest growing cloud company in the world.
“Cloud adoption is growing very rapidly. Our overall cloud growth rate is around 80 per cent range in SaaS and PaaS. Why we are growing very fast is that we are the only provider offering full range of cloud services like IaaS, SaaS and PaaS,” John Fowler, Executive Vice-President for the systems business of Oracle, said in an exclusive interview with Gulf News.
ERP, sales and apps come under SaaS (software-as-a-service) while authoring tools, databases, Java, IoT and analytics come under PaaS (platform-as-a-service), and infrastructure layer, physical servers, storage and data centres come under IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service).
The American company has signed deals with Sharjah Investment and Development Authority (Shurooq) for Oracle SaaS, with First Gulf Bank to implement Oracle’s Big Data and Business Analytics solutions and with Apparels Group for cloud solutions at Gitex.
Fowler said that Oracle has more than 500 cloud customers in the Middle East and have an entire portfolio of hardware and software suites for enterprise computing. Oracle is the only IT company that is able to offer everything in enterprise computing — from chips to hardware to cloud services and everything in between.
Huge opportunity
Oracle’s executive chairman and chief technology officer Larry Ellison had said that Oracle would become the first SaaS company to achieve $10 billion (Dh36.7 billion) in sales.
“We think there is a huge opportunity in the cloud market. Amazon and Microsoft do not have the same growth rate we have,” he said.
Oracle’s cloud revenues are expected to hit close to $3 billion this fiscal year.
The big cloud computing players are Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, Google, Workday, Microsoft, IBM and SAP.
“We are a force to be reckoned with in the cloud computing market. We know what our customers want. They want performance, cost efficiency, security and availability,” he said.
He said that Oracle is benefiting a lot from the region’s drive for digital transformation, especially the UAE.
“What we are doing in the UAE is identical to what we are doing in the US, Europe and other countries. What we are planning at Abu Dhabi is a fully capable data centre which is expected to be completed in the first half of next year.
Performance
“It is all about enterprise computing and all we run is ERP, CRM and mission-critical cloud applications, so we have to build it to the highest possible availability and performance. Even though it is taking time but when we finish it, it will be a world-class data centre,” he said.
Oracle’s large and lucrative business of selling software licenses to companies that run programs on site is shrinking rapidly.
Regarding this, he said that is a natural thing going on as more and more companies are using cloud computing. Cloud computing right now is only a tiny fraction of total IT market.
“For us, we are uniquely positioned compared to other vendors like HP, EMC or Dell. Companies that have run their businesses on on-premises systems and software for the past 30 to 40 years are not going to shift everything to the cloud in one year or five years or perhaps even 10 years. Everybody will be on both sides, which are on-premises systems and cloud.
He believes the next decade is about enterprises making choices between using cloud services and on-premises computing. There’s no magic day where people just wake up and it’s all suddenly in the cloud.
