Oracle has created “complete AI-powered end-to-end ecosystem-automation platforms” by creating more than 1,000 agents and fusing them with existing applications to drive vertical-market innovation while undercutting the foolish and dangerous myth that AI is destroying the SaaS business.
I’m pointedly using the term “dangerous” to describe the much-rumored ‘SaaSpocalypse’ because it’s not only absurd but has also:
- caused unwarranted doubt and confusion among customers who don’t have the luxury of time as they race to equip themselves for success in the AI Economy;
- slashed hundreds of billions in market-cap value from the software industry;
- triggered extensive layoffs and/or invest pullbacks among ecosystem partners; and
- has added unnecessary uneasiness about “the dark side of AI” across customers, partners, vendors, and investors.
Within recent weeks, Salesforce, Workday, SAP, and ServiceNow have all tried to tamp down the near-panic by attempting to articulate clearly the ways in which the enterprise-application has changed and will continue to change, while simultaneously explaining why the dreaded SaaSpocalypse is almost as real as Sasquatch.
And while all of those efforts have been productive, I believe that Oracle CEO Mike Sicilia along with chairman Larry Ellison have provided the best arguments yet that the rapidly evolving and AI-powered enterprise-apps business can deliver more value than ever before to customers, and that the latest lamentations from the doomsday brigade should be resoundingly ignored.
During Oracle’s fiscal-Q3 earnings call last week — and you can read my analyses of the company’s excellent results here and here — Sicilia, with a bit of help from Ellison, laid out a compelling case for Oracle’s totally modernized applications strategy that should give customers and prospects lots of things to think about. Here’s a quick synopsis of what Oracle is doing, and then I’ll share some perspectives on each from Sicilia and, toward the end, Ellison.
- Automating entire industries
- Slashing time to value for customers
- Infusing more than 1,000 agents into its apps
- Using customer success to refute SaaSpocalypse
- Pushing the approach across multiple industries
- Helping customers leverage apps for larger initiatives
- Driving innovation and growth across industries
- Embracing the role of SaaS disruptor
1. Automating entire industries. “Oracle has the fastest-growing and most complete suite of cloud applications in the market. Our SaaS solutions are industry-complete platforms with highly scalable, trusted, secure, and regulatory compliance systems and processes, in which our customers trust us to run the systems that run their businesses,” Sicilia said on the call. “A great example is healthcare, where our brand-new, AI-powered, ambulatory EHR — electronic health record —system is live in the market, and the results are quite clear. We are reducing administrative overhead, we’re allowing clinicians to see more patients, we’re improving access to care, and we’re increasing provider satisfaction.”
2. Slashing time to value for customers. “What customers are asking us is, ‘How can we consume as much AI out of the box that you’re putting into your applications across the board? And how can we get that up and live as quickly as we possibly can because we think that’s the best way to actually realize value?’ These systems that we’re running at Oracle are highly complex mission-critical systems. We have decades of industry experience, decades of regulatory compliance. And these are the systems that our customers use to run their business, run their government agency, run their healthcare organization, whatever the case is. I really like our position here.”
3. Infusing more than 1,000 agents into its apps. “We’ve already delivered well over 1,000 agents right inside our horizontal back-office and industry applications. This doesn’t even include the agents that our customers are building themselves or the fleet of agents that we’re using internally. These are AI features built right into our applications and existing processes…. We have 1,000 AI agents already live in Fusion. Our banking suite alone has hundreds of AI agents, and that’s just inside our banking solution.”
4. Using customer success to refute SaaSpocalypse hooey. “Among the customers I’ve spoken with, I’ve not yet met a single customer who tells me they’re ready to give away their retail merchandising system, their core banking system, their demand-deposit account systems, or their electronic health record systems because they’re going to cobble together some niche AI features to replace all of that overnight. In fact, you hear quite the opposite from the customers…. I do think that AI tools and their coding capabilities would be a threat if we weren’t adopting them, but we are — and we’re doing so very rapidly. Oracle is using the best AI coding tools and the best developers not only to accelerate our SaaS business but to deliver solutions that enable entire ecosystems across numerous industries.”
5. Driving this approach across multiple industries. In addition to the healthcare example cited above, Sicilia cited Oracle’s new AI-powered capabilities in banking and retail. “In banking, we provide a comprehensive AI-powered SaaS platform, including everything from commercial banking, retail banking, investment banking, anti-money laundering, financial crimes and compliance, payments, supply-chain financing, CX, ERP, and HCM. That banking suite alone contains hundreds of embedded AI agents, all available at no additional cost to our customers. In retail, our AI-enabled solutions span merchandising, assortment planning, supply-chain management, point-of-sale, commerce, and of course, ERP, CX, and HCM.
In summary, these are not systems that can be replaced by a small collection of niche features cobbled together and bolted on in the name of AI.” Oracle also offers AI-powered industry suites for hospitality, construction, restaurants, local governments, and telecommunications
6. Helping customers leverage apps for larger initiatives. “Oracle’s embrace of AI across our strategic applications is leading to broader enterprise conversations with our customers, involving our full stack: OCI, AI Data Platform, Fusion applications, industry suites. These conversations are about ecosystem automation. They’re not about single apps, they’re about automating the entire ecosystem. And they’re further enabled by our simplified go-to-market model, which we spoke about in our last earnings call. This is allowing us to close more multi-product deals with more customers, combining the power of the Oracle Database, our OCI platform, our AI tooling, and our complete applications suites.”
7. Driving innovation and growth across industries. Here’s Ellison on the scope of Oracle’s ambitions with its agentic-AI-charged suites: “We provide a lot of AI capability built into our applications, but they are open. They are open so they can allow our customers and our partners to add to that portfolio of agents. And we build an entire ecosystem that automates healthcare, automates financial services, automates retail. That is what AI is allowing us to do: expand our horizons for the scope of the suites of the SaaS software we’re building to automate entire ecosystems.” Ellison has frequently expressed this vision of how technology can provide end-to-end visibility across industries and thereby enable companies within those industries to move more rapidly and intelligently while also reducing costs and increasing opportunities.
Final Thought
While the big enterprise-apps companies didn’t create this SaaSpocalypse bogeyman, it is very much their responsibility to expose its absurdity, obliterate it, and bury it. Oracle used its Q3 earnings call in large part to shred this odious fantasy, and Oracle and the other big vendors will need to keep doing it in ways that clearly articulate customer benefits of new and improved AI-powered apps and the inextricable fusion of modern apps and agentic AI.
If they summon the will and the customer-centric voice to do that, then I think that by the end of this year, the whole SaaSpocalypse idiocy will be the butt of well-deserved derision rather than perceived as the destroyer of carefully crafted worlds.
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