Oracle: It’s Time For A ‘Digital Transformation’ In Cloud Computing

The people in charge of Oracle, one of the world’s biggest cloud computing companies, have laid out their visions for how the industry need to adapt and change over the next few years.

Speaking at the Oracle OpenWorld 2015 event in San Francisco, CEO Mark Hurd and CTO Larry Ellison highlighted the need for what they say is a ‘digital transformation’.

And Hurd took to the stage to lay out his view for what the cloud market will look like in ten year’s time.

Transition

“We’re going to lead this…this decade-long transition to the cloud,” Hurd said, claiming that Oracle was “in a class alone” and the only IT company capable of coexisting on-premise or in the cloud.

His ‘Vision 2025’ projection looked to build on this, laying out how Oracle sees the industry changing as new challengers enter the market and old hands fall out.

Hurd said he believes that in ten years’ time, 80 percent of all production apps will be in the cloud – a huge growth from today’s figure, which currently sits at around 25 percent.

And in this increasingly cloud-dominated industry, Hurd predicts that only two companies (one of which will of course be Oracle) will provide around 80 percent of the SaaS market, as only they are capable of supplying a full suite comprising hundreds of applications.

Also, Hurd says that 100 percent of new dev/testing will be in the cloud, as one of the least managed and governed areas in IT becomes more regulated and governed.

“The days of…doing this on-premise are done,” Hurd says, adding that he believes that virtually all enterprise data will be stored in clouds by 2025.  Noting that more data is already stored in clouds than in traditional storage systems, Hurd said that the huge growth in IoT connected devices will create a whole world of new opportunities for companies like Oracle.

But all this data will need to be kept safe, Hurd said, predicting that by 2025, the enterprise cloud will be one of the most secure IT environments – although he believes that the Oracle cloud is there today, thanks to its full security IP to run its cloud and use of full data encryption by default.

“We are more secure than anyone,” he noted, “the key to your data sits with you, not us.”

Shift

Hurd’s view of the need for a full-blown digital transformation was echoed by his former boss, now Oracle CTO, Larry Ellison

“We are in the middle of a generational shift in computing,” Ellison said in his first keynote, noting that this change is equal to the move to personal computing a decade ago.

Although the cloud market is pushing this forward, the shift is still somewhat in progress, he believes, as there is no truly huge cloud company – with the biggest only recording revenues of around $6bn.

Oracle is obviously gunning for this position, as the company prepares for “a new era of utility computing”, Ellison noted, as the worlds of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS all come closer together, with the company needing to carry out massive changes to keep at the top.

Oracle has rewrite all their programs to run as a service for the cloud, Ellison explained, as it pushes for ‘the integrated cloud’.

“It’s been 10 years since Oracle realised that we’re going to have to rewrite virtually all of our applications and make them run on the cloud as a service,” he said.

“We started the Fusion project about a decade ago. It was a lot of work. It wasn’t simply a matter of rewriting our applications.”

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