Oracle: We Don’t Pay Attention To IBM And SAP Anymore

Oracle has called out the likes of IBM and SAP as it says its nearest rivals have completely changed over the past few years.

Company founder Larry Ellison described how a “stunning change” in the development of the cloud market recently means that Oracle’s main competitors are now completely different to a decade ago.

Speaking during his keynote at the Oracle OpenWorld 2015 event in San Francisco, Ellison revealed that the company really only sees Microsoft as a competitor due to its ability to provide three tiers of cloud services.

“Only Oracle and Microsoft is in every level of the cloud – applications, platform, and infrastructure,” he said.

All change

“The world has changed,” Ellison said, noting that the two companies Oracle previously watched the most closely over the past decade (SAP and IBM), are no longer worth its attention.

“We do not watch them at all anymore,” Ellison said with relish, “They’re nowhere in the cloud.”

Instead of SAP, who Ellison says “you never see in the cloud”, Oracle is now paying close attention to the likes of Salesforce.com and Workday in the SaaS apps space, as both have shown successful growth, although they are still unable to offer a full cloud package (as Salesforce.com has two tiers of cloud, with Workday only on one).

In the PaaS space, it is Microsoft (not IBM) that gains Oracle’s attention, as Ellison noted that it is “the only one of our traditional competitors that has moved across effectively,” thanks to its major investment in Azure cloud.

Finally, in the infrastructure/IaaS space, it’s now Amazon, not IBM and EMC, which Oracle watches, which Ellison said was “another stunning change.”

“We compete with Amazon in cloud infrastructure and never, ever see IBM – this is how much our world has changed.”

Ellison highlighted how Oracle’s ability to offer a complete suite of cloud services has led the company to continue to grow and succeed in recent years. In particular, he noted that the company is now selling more SaaS and PaaS products than Salesforce.com (including an industry record $426m sold in the fourth quarter of its 2015 financial year), and is aiming to sell more than £1.5bn in SaaS and PaaS in the entirety of this year.

“I think we’re doing pretty well actually,” he concluded.

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