Oracle takes the cloud

Oracle’s cloud business: could it overtake SAP? 

Larry Ellison thinks that cloud computing will give the company an edge over SAP in the enterprise app market. Since May, Oracle has reported combined applications revenue of $2.86 billion USD, their SaaS revenue was up 76% over the previous months. Most importantly, Oracle’s Cloud ERP business for the company has skyrocketed up 156% compared to last year’s numbers.

Meanwhile, Bill McDermott of SAP claims that SAP is, in fact, the fastest-growing cloud ERP solution. However, Steve Cox, VP of Oracle reacts to the statement with: “There is only one leader in cloud ERP: Oracle. The facts speak for themselves: 868 new customers for Oracle ERP Cloud—a true public-cloud SaaS offering—a number that does not include new NetSuite customers or E-Business Suite, JD Edwards or Peoplesoft customers who have moved to Oracle Infrastructure as a Service.”

Oracle picks up BofA as a new customer

Bank of America selects Oracle for its ERP and financial planning software needs. CEO Mark Hurd promises, “Oracle will deliver Bank of America the most modern, complete, global ERP applications in the world.” Bank of America has selected the ERP giant to cover their international general ledger and broker-dealer systems. Rival, SAP, will provide the enterprise resource planning for the rest of the company.

Of the agreement, Cathy Bessant, Chief Operations and Technology Officer of Bank of America says: “Our agreement with Oracle is about our technology and culture; we’ll learn with and from each other to deliver the best solutions. We anticipate 80 percent of our technology workloads will be delivered on the cloud within the next few years, and this solution for general ledger reflects our evolving strategy and the improvements in cloud security and economics.”

Oracle refreshes entire SaaS line, fueling cloud momentum

Commonly updating their SaaS applications twice yearly, the company is setting off to add brand-new features in an effort to keep selections fresh. Prior to cloud computing companies would need a full IT staff and data center, however, it has become much more accessible. “We have a big installed base now and they’ve been giving us feedback on the UI,” says Steve Miranda, Oracle’s Executive VP for Applications Product Development, “Release 13 is a big improvement in the UI across the board with new visualization capabilities and new mobile abilities throughout…the UI refresh is also about staying contemporary with the way the apps look and flow. For example, you see web pages now that scroll vertically, getting away from train-style where you go from one page to the next page and the next and so on.”

Release 13 includes new applications and features for Oracle SCM Cloud, Oracle CX Cloud, Oracle ERP Cloud, and Oracle HCM Cloud.

Oracle, AT&T leaders on their cloud migration deal

The largest Telecom company in the world (by revenue), AT&T has the job of moving thousands of internal databases to the cloud: They’ll be doing this with Oracle. The goal is to virtualize 75% of core network functions by 2020 and plan to hit 55% by the end of 2017. IDG Sits down with Mark Hurd and John Donovan to discuss what this all means for the two companies in collaboration.

Hurd says this collaboration will be beneficial not just for the two tech companies, but for those working on the projects and future customers as well: “The competencies built out of just this project alone, at scale, isn’t just gonna benefit AT&T, isn’t gonna just benefit Oracle, it’s gonna benefit all of those customers in the market and so when you look down the road three, four, five, six, seven years, there’s gonna be a slew of engineers that have come out of this project working across all of corporate America.”

One of the biggest benefits AT&T predicts about its switch to the Cloud is transportation and technician precision in scheduling. Donovan says, “Take workforce management for our dispatch function. We have 70,000 trucks we dispatch every day — one of the largest fleets in America — and administratively it takes thousands of people to get those delivered effectively to customers.Our hope is that we’re gonna move from four-hour appointment windows to one-hour appointment windows and that’s a huge impact because the most common call center call related to this is, “Where’s my technician?” So it’s one of those rare virtuous cycles: it’s better for the technicians; it’s better for the customer. It isn’t just that the database moves. It’s that we’re using the database and the application, adding to it machine learning and artificial intelligence so what we learned yesterday we can apply today and have that effected in a very large scale organization.”

Will Oracle take the ERP app market with its cloud edge? 

What do you think? Is Oracle going to surpass SAP for the ERP app market with its advances in cloud computing? Tell us your thoughts in the comments and you could be featured in a future article on our blog.