As Oracle has surged into the #2 spot on the Cloud Wars Top 10, customers are benefitting not only from Oracle engineering AI deeply into every piece of its massive product portfolio but also because “we are the custodians of the data,” according to CEO Mike Sicilia.
In our video interview late last week spurred by Oracle leapfrogging Microsoft and claiming the #2 spot on the Cloud Wars Top 10 rankings, Sicilia discussed Oracle’s unique approach to the AI Revolution, particularly in light of chairman Larry Ellison’s contention that “AI changes everything.” You can watch the full interview here.
In addition, Sicilia also tackled head-on my question about the unprecedented challenge that he and fellow Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk face in being the only CEOs in the history of business responsible for turning more than half a trillion dollars — $523 billion, to be precise — in contracted orders into successful deliveries and delighted customers.
As big challenges go, that’s a pretty attractive one, and Sicilia’s reply reveals a great deal about the culture and mindset inside Oracle as it approaches an extended period of hypergrowth fueled by enormous demand for its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), along with impressive growth from all parts of its business as revealed in these numbers for the quarter ended Nov. 30:
- RPO (remaining performance obligation) soared 433% to $523.3 billion;
- in Q2 alone, RPO increased by $68 billion (that’s almost $750 million every single day);
- RPO expected to be recognized as revenue in the next 12 months grew 40%, compared with 21% a year ago and 25% in the previous quarter;
- total cloud revenue grew 34% to $8 billion;
- cloud infrastructure revenue jumped 66% to $4.1 billion;
- total cloud database services revenue rose 30%;
- Autonomous Database revenue jumped 43%; and
- Multicloud consumption was up 817%.
Here are a few highlights from the interview with Sicilia, who along with Magouyrk assumed the CEO roles three months ago following the move in October by former CEO Safra Catz to Executive Vice-Chairman.
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AI Infusion from infrastructure to databases to vertical apps: “We’ve engineered AI right into our products — not as bolt ons, not as an afterthought — but right into everything from the AI Database to the AI Data Platform to AI where we’re helping customers train and inference data, build applications faster, make smarter decisions, and also embedding that same AI into infrastructure as a service, right into our ERP applications, and right into things like our Retail Merchandising applications.”
“Custodians of the data”: “Think about ERP and Retail Merchandising together, and then an AI backbone underneath it — that really plays to very quick time to value for customers. And in the world of AI, very quick time to value has a lot to do with data gravity. And we are the custodians of the data. We’re the creators of a lot of the data from our applications — and being able to take those packaged applications and position the AI Data Platform alongside them and put that together into a very quick time to value with an AI-enabled solution for customers is, I think, making a big difference. And obviously it’s driving our growth, as you mentioned.”
Customers can leverage *all* their data, not just Oracle data: The Oracle Data Platform, Sicilia said, “is aggregating data not just from Oracle databases, not just from Oracle Applications, but from our competitor applications, from bespoke workloads, from competitor databases. We’re not saying that it has to be all running on Oracle in order for us to be able to get AI value…. And with our Multicloud, customers can run this in our competitors’ clouds — the other hyperscalers — as well as in our open ecosystem for all of our data gravity and turnkey AI solutions as well.”
Fulfilling $523 billion in contracted business: “For decades, we’ve been helping customers modernize, innovate and win in very mission-critical operations. We’ve been in these no-fail missions. It’s been part of our DNA — it was part of the history of the company, 50 years ago, with the very first customer [the CIA]. So for us, taking on very complex problems and providing solutions to those problems in timely, efficient and reliable ways is part of what we do now. And you could say, hey, the scale of this one is big — it’s really big — and our job is to build supply as fast as we possibly can. I mean, we have this situation where demand still far outstrips supply — and I think that’s just the world we live, the AI world we live in. But, here at Oracle, we really enjoy taking on and solving and delivering on complex problems and I think what got us so excited here is that we all have a little taste of what AI is going to do for the world.”
Final Thought
Those comments offer just a taste of the strategic insights Sicilia offered, so I strongly encourage you to watch the entire interview because it reveals some great insights into what’s happening at this highly differentiated company that is likely well on its way to becoming the world’s fastest-growing major cloud/AI vendor in the greatest growth market the world has ever known.
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