Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily news and commentary show, hosted by Cloud Wars Founder Bob Evans. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the Cloud.
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In this Cloud Wars Minute, Bob Evans discusses comments from Oracle CEO Safra Catz, who projects 50% cloud growth for the upcoming quarter.
Highlights
00:35 — Late last week, Bob reported some details on Oracle’s fiscal Q3 earnings. The company saw a 45% growth rate in its cloud revenue for the quarter that ended February 28.
00:55 — On its most recent earnings call, Oracle executives guided to a Q4 (which ends May 31) growth rate of 50%.
01:12 — These results are remarkable during a time when other Cloud Wars Top 10 companies are reporting flat growth rates, or in some cases, declining ones.
01:32 — Oracle CEO Safra Catz shared a few insightful remarks on the most recent earnings call. Catz noted that “cloud is no longer just about renting white boxes — it’s about velocity and value.”
02:01 — Catz also made “extensive comments” about Oracle’s use of artificial intelligence (AI), which she refers to as the use of “real Enterprise AI.” With AI, Oracle customers were able to “close their books in days, not weeks.” Customers are able to service more relevant sales leads. In Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), AI is not only boosting the performance and security of the product. Finally, she noted that AI is helping to drive business transformation.
02:43 — Bob applauds Catz for discussing how AI is impacting business transformation as a whole, not just digital transformation.
03:02 — Bob acknowledges that Oracle’s cloud business is relatively small compared to hyperscalers like Microsoft, AWS, and Google Cloud. “The difference is, more and more customers are finding that Oracle is the best solution for what they want.”
03:48 — Oracle’s latest growth numbers, and its future projections, “run totally counter to what is happening to a lot of the other fantastic companies on the Cloud Wars Top 10.” Regardless of the relative size of Oracle’s business, that needs to be called out.
04:08 — Both Safra Catz and Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison really made a big point of talking about what Oracle is doing with AI. Bob says that Ellison focused on how AI is a big, new initiative for the company as it relates to healthcare.
04:33 — Bob says he wants to point out that these numbers deserve extra attention. “Oracle’s performance is just so dramatically different from what’s happening across the Cloud Wars Top 10.”
