Heavy cloud covering at Oracle OpenWorld 2015

Ellison and Hurd both use keynotes to push vendor's ambitious cloud agenda at San Francisco event taking place this week

Cloud has been the order of the week at Oracle OpenWorld, with CTO Larry Ellison unveiling over a dozen new cloud services and capabilities in his opening keynote, and CEO Hurd looking into his crystal ball with cloud predictions for the next decade.

According to Ellison, Oracle is taking a different approach to cloud services and strategy than its rivals Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce and Workday, by building cloud services with open standards, thus giving customers the choice where they run workloads – either on Oracle’s cloud, in their own datacenter, or on a rival cloud.

“It means we have to work hard to keep you as a customer, because you have choices,” he said. Ellison explained that six design goals shape the development of Oracle’s cloud portfolio: lowest possible operating cost, reliability, fastest performance, open standards, compatibility between cloud and on-premise and built-in always-on security. Businesses are in the middle of a ‘generational shift’ in computing, he said.

But Ellison stressed that on-premise also had a future: “On-premise computing is not going to vanish. Even if on-premise computing eventually becomes a smaller piece of the pie than cloud computing, there’s going to be a long period of transition.”

And the channel was not forgotten during the opening days of the conference. Oracle ran dedicated sessions for channel partners, with streams aimed at ISVs, system integrators and VARs, all with a cloudy theme and a strong suggestion that they need to get behind the cloud and convince their customers that the industry is being shaken up by the cloud.

Sticking with the cloud theme in his keynote, Hurd predicted that by 2025, 80 per cent of all production apps will be in the cloud, compared to 25 per cent today.

He also ambitiously predicted that two SaaS providers will control 80 per cent of the cloud enterprise application market, and said Oracle would be one of them.

Sticking with the 2025 predictions, he said 100 per cent of software development/testing efforts will be conducted in the cloud, and all enterprise data will be stored virtually in the cloud.

“More data is in the cloud now than in traditional storage systems,” he said.

His final prediction was that the enterprise cloud will be the most secure IT environment.

“We are fully patched, fully secured, fully encrypted – that’s our cloud,” he said.

Hurd said the modern day business is looking to cut costs, particularly in IT, but are often stuck with an ‘aged and brittle’ legacy environment. This means there is an “incredible need for innovation, very old infrastructure, and there’s no money,” he said, adding that the cloud will be the only way for these companies to achieve their cost-cutting goals.

“Being able to move quickly, being able to adjust to market dynamics, and being able to do it fast and do it while you deliver, is what's on CEOs' minds,” Hurd said. “[Oracle is] going to lead [this] ten-year transition to the cloud.”