As her company is surging through one of the greatest growth stretches in its 48-year history, Oracle CEO Safra Catz offered a grandly sweeping perspective on the cloud and the AI Revolution by noting that technological innovation is essential for not only businesses but also entire civilizations.
“Transforming yourself and modernizing yourself — that’s not a destination, it’s a constant journey,” Catz said in a recent exclusive interview for our Cloud Wars CEO Outlook 2025 series. (You can watch the entire interview here.)
“In fact, anytime you stop, your competitors are going to pass you,” Catz said in describing one of the key messages she shares with Oracle customers.
“And one of the reasons that businesses succeed is when they’re adaptable and when they’re absorbing those new technologies. But those that sort of stick with what they have? They get passed over.”
That’s a marketplace dynamic that Catz has witnessed many times in her 25 years as a top executive at Oracle, including the past 5-1/2 years as sole CEO. But Catz said she has never seen a time filled with as much opportunity as exists today, as more and more business leaders realize that moving to the cloud is essential for everything from modernizing workflows to leveraging the full power of their data to dazzling customers and becoming full participants in the AI Revolution that’s reshaping the business world.
But those rewards require bold commitments to new approaches and a fearless willingness to change what they’ve been doing for decades, whether the leaders making those decisions are CEOs or the heads of countries, Catz said.
“And by the way, this is true not only in companies — whole civilizations survive or disappear because of whether they’re adaptable to new conditions and new capabilities, and those that really take advantage of them are going to prosper,” said Catz, who was the Cloud Wars CEO of the Year in 2022 when Oracle’s growth tear in the cloud took hold.
“And today we’re seeing that. We’re seeing this incredible prosperity and improvement in productivity, in capability, in really meeting customer expectations and exceeding them. And that’s what we’re pushing forward with.”
Central to that push from Oracle is the belief, championed by Catz and chairman Larry Ellison, that tech vendors like Oracle must take on more responsibility for making it easier for customers to understand, deploy, and gain benefit from technology, particularly as the transformative power of AI becomes pervasive. And nowhere is that rebalancing of responsibility more apparent than in Oracle’s wildly ambitious initiative to modernize and automate the entire healthcare industry.
Catz said that the old approach to healthcare technology — fragmented, incomplete, disconnected, and leaving it to hospitals and clinics and labs to try to tie all that together — is doomed.
“That’s just not right, and that’s coming to an end,” she said.
“Anyone who goes to the hospital or a doctor, you see that — as great as our physicians are and our nurses are and the equipment, it’s all amazing — there are still a lot of doctors typing into things and spending a lot of their time doing that instead of spending the time with the patient.
“But now we can offer a complete system that just listens to that entire interaction and records it and transcribes it and gives recommendations to the physicians — what an incredible time saver! Instead of having doctors spend time putting data into the system, you actually have the system help the physicians figure out what’s best for you.”
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That overall approach is one that Oracle’s deploying across every major industry with its rapidly developing portfolio of “industry suites,” which will be complete bundles of operating technology designed to manage functions and processes and data flows and security and more within vertical industries. And Catz was adamant in stating that the time has come for the healthcare industry to enjoy the many benefits that modern tech can offer.
“Think about it: in the shopping world, we’ve been in the 21st century for a long time–they’re always recommending that next thing you should buy. But in healthcare? Nope! It’s still stuck in typing all the data into the system like the old days.
“And that has been a real passion for the whole company, and we’ve put a lot of energy into it and I think a lot of our employees are very excited about being part of it because as much as we love to make shopping more efficient, or running a giant utility more efficient — and all of that is very important, just like helping a bank be better and more efficient — but when you’re in healthcare, you’re actually saving lives!” Catz said.
“And that’s the extra oomph that we feel.”
While that “extra oomph” is showcased within the Oracle healthcare business, it’s also present across the entire company, which in 2025 should top $25 billion in cloud revenue with a cloud infrastructure business growing at well over 50%.
Reflected within those growth numbers, customers in 2025 will be more confident about making the bold choices that are essential in a business world that’s stunningly different than it was just 5 or 10 years ago, Catz said.
“The reality is that industrial companies and governments and other types of large organizations are all realizing that they cannot waste resources. They have to use all of their resources to drive a better customer experience, better employee experience, and better supplier experience.
“Many of them learned that lesson during COVID,” Catz said, “but were afraid, to some extent, to move all the way in. So they started in one place, and now they’ve built that confidence and they’re going to go all the way. “More and more of our customers are not only moving into the infrastructure cloud, not only the database cloud, not even only the applications cloud, but even the vertical applications cloud,” Catz said.
“People are saying, ‘I have to get in there or I’m going to be left out!’ And so yes, they’re being bold, and they’re watching others be bold, and that is really encouraging them.”
Final Thought
While Safra Catz is the CEO of one of the world’s fastest-growing and most successful enterprise-tech companies, she rarely speaks in public. So our recent interview with one of the world’s top business leaders offers the rare opportunity to understand where Oracle and its customers are today and where Catz believes they’re going in 2025 and beyond. You can see the whole 1:1 interview here.
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