“We are in the middle of a generational shift in computing that is no less important than our shift to personal computing, when mainframes and mini computers dominated our industries…it seems like early days, since our biggest cloud business are only $6 billion…not $100 billion… – Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison’s Opening Keynote Address at the Oracle OpenWorld 2015                    Photo by Marcus Siu

Article and Photo by Marcus Siu

SAN FRANCISCO, October 25, 2015 – Executive Chairman and CTO, Larry Ellison’s Opening Keynote address at Oracle’s OpenWorld 2015 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco last Sunday, reminded us that the “Cloud” has now been around for over 15 years, even before there was a term known as the “Cloud”.  Companies such as NetSuite and Salesforce were already engaged in doing business as a Software as a Service (SaaS) at its infancy around the beginning of 2000.

It’s been ten years since Oracle realized that in order to compete with these companies and an untapped industry, they had to rewrite virtually all of their applications in order to make them run on the cloud.   For Oracle’s fusion project, not only did they have to rewrite the applications, but they also had to rewrite the middleware, which took a tremendous amount of resources, including the complexities of dealing with the Oracle multitenant database.

Around the same time, Amazon pioneered their “EC2”, (Elastic Compute Cloud); also known today as AWS (Amazon Web Services), which provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud services.  Oracle immediately realized that if they were going to compete in the PaaS business (platform as a service), then they had to be in the IaaS business, (infrastructure as a service).   Customers should also have the option to use any applications they need, regardless if they are Oracle products.

Oracle OpenWorld at Moscone West                                                                            Photo: Marcus Siu

“Here’s the irony of it all; we went to the SaaS business and came to understand that required us to be in the platform business, and we went into the platform business and came to understand we had to be in the infrastructure as a service business.

That’s how we got to where we are today”.

Ten years ago, Oracle used to see pay particular attention to IBM, which Ellison describes as “the greatest company of all companies”, and SAP, the largest application company in the world, for the last two decades.

Today, Oracle no longer pays attention to neither one of them.

Oracle’s Cloud competitors include Amazon, Salesforce, Workday, and its traditional rival competitor, Microsoft.

However, Microsoft and Oracle are the only two companies that offer all three layers of the cloud that provide users with access to an integrated set of IT solutions, including the Applications (SaaS), Platform (Paas), and Infrastructure (Iaas) layers.

Oracle has the largest set of enterprise applications of any company.

Oracle and Microsoft are the only two companies who provide all three  layers of the cloud.             Photo by Marcus Siu