Oracle claims it is quicker than rivals in the cloud

Senior vice president for cloud Shawn Price claims firm wants to compete at 'every level' of cloud market

Oracle's rivals are late to the cloud shift, meaning the vendor will compete at "every level" of the market, according to Shawn Price, senior vice president for cloud.

Last year Oracle made clear its ambitions to focus on cloud at OpenWorld during which it unveiled over a dozen new cloud services. And this week the US giant announced its first-ever cloud partner programme, Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), as part of its push to bring its cloud offerings to its network of partners.

Price told CRN that Oracle is in an excellent position to compete against its rivals in this market.

"We spend $5.4bn (£3.7bn) on R&D every year and that is double our nearest competitor," he said. "So not only are they not spending the requisite R&D as a percentage of total revenue, they don't have the base from which to actually evolve."

Price labelled any comments that Oracle is itself late to the cloud party as "naïve" and said it couldn't have made this shift any faster.

"If you look at our competitors, they don't have a cloud ERP offering," he said. "If you think about SAP, it has no [ERP] offering in the cloud. We are often tagged as being late to the cloud, but if you look at the performance, the scale, that's very naïve. We have 19 datacentres, 70 million subscriptions, 600 million SaaS applications and we have taken all the infrastructure that our customers have bought from us and imported that to the cloud.

"We've added infrastructure and data, and I think what we've done in a seven to 10-year transition probably couldn't have been undertaken by any other company."

Price did concede that in certain areas Oracle has not been as quick with this shift as it could have been, but overall he felt assured of its position over competitors.

"So when people say ‘you were late with this little piece of HCM (human capital management)', I could argue yes we probably were late with pieces, but in terms of what customers are doing, I think in fact we are highly differentiated and everything else is fragmented."

But despite Price's bold claims about Oracle's cloud position, other players such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) have outstripped Oracle's cloud growth.

Public cloud player AWS' sales were at $2.4bn for its Q4 2015, up 69 per cent annually. While for its Q2 results, Oracle's total cloud sales were at $649m for Q2, but this was only a 26 per cent year-on-year increase.

Oracle has an advantage over players such as AWS in the breadth of its cloud offering, with AWS only accelerating in the public cloud, and not offering hybrid as well, Price said.

"With our IaaS offering that's baked and full, we are in that market too now," he said.

When asked if Oracle could compete against AWS in the infrastructure market, Price said: "We are going to compete at every level."

When pressed if it could every overtake AWS in the cloud, he said: "Who knows? I hope so."