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Oracle's Hurd brims with confidence about SaaS, social and cloud

16.07.2012
To hear Oracle President Mark Hurd tell it, the $37.1 billion hardware and software company is well ahead of competitors on any number of fronts, from transitioning customers to SaaS and the cloud, to incorporating social technology into its products. Exuding supreme confidence in , hardware/software combos such as exabyte storage and its latest buyouts, Hurd said in a recent interview with IDG Enterprise that the main thing keeping him awake at night is "customers making decisions and we're not there. We've got to make sure we're there."

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To that end, Oracle has recently added 3,300 salespeople and armed them with an increasingly broad product portfolio designed to give customers the choice of hosting and managing their own apps, handing most control over to Oracle or doing something in between. Oracle is fortifying its salesforce by process and subject area, such as human capital management (HCM), but encourages its salespeople to then address customer needs by representing SaaS, private cloud and on-premise versions of its apps.

Hurd, who joined Oracle from HP in 2010, argues that his company offers far more choice than competitors in that it directly sells infrastructure and apps, whereas others such as IBM and constant specialize in one or the other. His only acknowledgement during this interview of companies that do challenge Oracle was of unnamed "boutique" SaaS firms in areas such as human resources, sales automation and service automation that most likely will be acquired, some no doubt by Oracle.

"I hate to say the ships have sailed, but if your ships aren't in the water halfway across the ocean already, you're going to have a hard time catching up," Hurd says.