Oracle accelerates Cloud transformation with 1000 new staff
The company, which spends more than $5 billion on research and development annually is in the middle of a major transformation and is set to hire 1000 new staff across APAC (with 150 of those going to its Australian operations).
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Oracle senior vice-president for cloud strategy, Shawn Price, told ARN the company was also expanding its datacentre footprint to Melbourne as it looked to offer end-to-end Cloud solutions. "It's no mystery that Oracle is in the midst of what I would characterise as the largest transformation of any company in computing," he said.
"It's quite a significant undertaking to migrate from on-premise to the Cloud and we are making significant inroads."
Oracle's third quarter 2015 results revealed revenue of $US9.3 billion - up 6 per cent.
But it's growth in Cloud was the big surprise.
Software-as-a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) grew 30 per cent to $US375 million, while Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) revenue was $US155 million, up 32 per cent.
Price said the company sat in a unique position with 70 million subscribers across 31 billion transactions.
"Australia is in a pretty unique position. We invested here early and today we have more than 2400 employees," he said.
"We have announced we are going to add an additional thousand employees [APAC] over the next four quarters and are accelerating.
"We are actively growing the company across all functions and we are seeing great retention and employee growth - people are really excited to move skills sets to the Cloud."
He said the large investment in the A/NZ market was due to Australia being the "number two Cloud-ready market in the world".
"13.5 million connected social users, you have got deep mobile penetration and companies that compete on a global scale around those two dimensions of operating model shift," he said. "We see it as an incredibly important market. I would almost say we're A/NZ goes, so goes the rest of Asia-Pacific."
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He said the company had seen huge growth in PaaS.
"You have SaaS - 600 apps, underpinning that is PaaS, Underpinning that is IaaS around compute and storage, and then our hardware strategy ties nicely to this," he said.
"When you looking at performance its pretty staggering how fast we are growing.
"We intend to be the number one Cloud company on a new and expansion bookings basis by the end of this year."
Price said that 95 per cent of all applications that contribute revenue for Oracle would be in the Cloud by the end of the year.
"One piece that people often underestimate is the robust size and scale of the Oracle ecosystem.
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"If you think about our distribution channel - its around ISV's, its around distributors, it's around managed service providers - they all give us multiple pathways to market which is pretty powerful."
Price said the company was also seeing as big shift in systems integrators across both across Oracle's boutique and diamond partners (top 10 partners globally).
"For a long time they have been asking how do we maintain our business when there just aren't enough big transformational ERP deals.
"We're getting enormous tailwind from our systems integrators and our channel strategy, in addition to what we are doing on a direct basis.
In terms of increase datacentre footprint, the company has expanded to disaster recovery in its Melbourne datacentre, while offering IaaS as part of its overall story.
"We are seeing mass adoption. It's pent up demand. I think the beautiful thing here is we didn't flash it out in the early stages of the market.
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"If you look at Oracle units of work, Oracle running on our hardware will run 30 per cent faster than on any other datacentre that you run it on.
"If you use my hardware my database, my compression algorithms: the storage cost, the compute will all be less.
"It's an enabler and a part of the story. It's not the story."
While competition in the Cloud market if fierce, Price believes no other company has the complete package.
"Oour competitors have pieces of the equation. Some have good applications, no platform, no infrastructure and no install base," he said.
"Others have reasonable infrastructure, but don't own the customer or the application workload, or the infrastructure.
"When you look at our customer base and what they do. When you look at the Cloud stack across four levels. I would say we are in a category on one."
"Take Microsoft, what they have is Office365, IaaS and OS development tools. But they don't have that application infrastructure that we have. Everyone lines up with an edge piece. What companies want is end to end."