Larry Ellison Wants It All—Can Oracle Get It?

In what was billed as an introduction to Oracle’s new CX strategy, Larry Ellison instead revealed his desire to build a single “closed-loop system” of interconnected end-to-end SaaS apps handling every business process a modern business might have.

(On my weekly Cloud Wars Top 10 rankings, #6 Oracle competes in enterprise apps with #3 Salesforce, #5 SAP, and #8 Workday, and in IaaS with #1 Microsoft, #2 Amazon and #4 Google Cloud.) 

Fusing LOB apps with vertical requirements

On top of that, Ellison mapped out Oracle’s desire to offer a massive portfolio of industry-specific solutions that fuse (no pun intended) the broad capabilities of his Fusion enterprise apps with unique industry-specific capabilities for vertical markets.

This is one of the hottest markets in the cloud, with Google Cloud, SAP, Microsoft and perhaps Amazon all eager to become leaders in this emerging category. (For more on that, please see Rumble in the Cloud: Amazon Battling Google, SAP, Microsoft in Sizzling New Market.)

Not content with all that, Ellison also took the opportunity to describe how this new wave of SaaS apps are very specifically optimized to work with his Gen2 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which extends his metaphor of the single closed-loop system beyond applications to cloud infrastructure.

We’ll analyze those various gambits in more detail in later pieces, but the big-picture story here is how Ellison and Oracle are looking to dramatically raise the stakes for the enterprise-apps market. 

Oracle’s unique status in cloud market

And, as Ellison likes to point out, Oracle is the only cloud vendor that is aggressively playing in both the SaaS layer of the cloud and the IaaS layer of the cloud. By spanning both of those segments of the cloud, Ellison feels that Oracle will be able to offer unique value to business customers as they accelerate their moves of high-impact and mission-critical workloads to the cloud.

And since Ellison has—at least as far as Oracle is concerned—totally folded the PaaS category into IaaS, this new articulation of his big ambitions for SaaS will push every SaaS vendor to drive new levels of innovation more rapidly.

Or they’ll risk being left behind, either in perception or in capabilities—or both.

In the past couple of months, we’ve also noted in detail Ellison’s huge plans for IaaS: 

• The Audacious Larry Ellison Flips Oracle Cloud Strategy Upside-Down
• Larry Ellison’s 10-Point Plan for Oracle to Beat Amazon, Microsoft, Google
• Larry Ellison’s Next Trick: Oracle Cloud and Nvidia Unleash Mainstream AI

With Ellison’s Autonomous Database now primarily positioned as an OCI cloud service that offers unique capabilities in conjunction with Oracle’s apps, Ellison is betting that his “single closed-loop system” that spans apps to infrastructure will make Oracle even more formidable in the Cloud Wars.

Disclosure: at the time of this writing, Oracle was among the many clients of Cloud Wars Media LLC and/or Evans Strategic Communications LLC.

Subscribe to the Cloud Wars Newsletter for in-depth analysis of the major cloud vendors from the perspective of business customers. It’s free, it’s exclusive and it’s great!