David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News
Mark V. Hurd, co-president of Oracle.
The selling, overseen by Mark V. Hurd, Oracle co-president, is already serious. “Unlike anyone else, we are supplying every layer in the stack” of technology that makes up cloud computing, Mr. Hurd said in an interview. “If you don’t get every part right, you are in deep trouble.” Since building it, “we’ve been very focused on engineering the system, educating the market on its value,” he said.
He said that Amazon Web Services, considered a leader in cloud, is by comparison “an infrastructure provider, a good one.” Microsoft, which also hopes to supply corporate computing through a “cloud” of Internet-connected computers, “has a capability” that might also be used in conjunction with Oracle. Salesforce.com, another potential competitor, includes code written 15 years ago, he noted. He did not mention his old employer, Hewlett-Packard, which this week also made claims to be a comprehensive cloud provider.
Oracle’s cloud computing initiative has been one of Mr. Hurd’s main jobs since he joined Oracle in September 2010, after resigning as chief executive of H.P. a month earlier. Since early 2011, Oracle has added 2,000 sales representatives, he said, who are mostly trained in specific areas like manufacturing or sales.
During a joint customer presentation with Lawrence J. Ellison, Oracle’s chief executive, Mr. Hurd said Oracle would offer service guarantees, including personal response, within five minutes. Oracle will also allow customers to mix in other vendors’ products, Mr. Hurd said in the interview. The performance guarantees, however, will apply only when customers buy everything from Oracle.
Mr. Ellison told his customers that Oracle had devoted “thousands of people, billions of dollars” to rebuilding all of its business software applications over the last seven years. He said over 100 applications had already been modified, in areas like sales, finance and risk management.
It was “a huge amount of innovation, a gigantic expense,” which also involved work with Oracle’s most powerful computers, he said. This will be “a huge barrier to entry for competitors like SAP,” he said, naming his largest competitor. “SAP said they wouldn’t have anything real in the cloud until 2020,” he said, “I don’t think they’ll make it.”
A spokesman for SAP noted that it entered the cloud business though an acquisition late last year. Of the $1 billion in cloud business that Mr. Hurd said Oracle was already doing annually, more than half comes from two large acquisitions late last year. Oracle’s fiscal 2011 revenues were $35.6 billion.
In an unusual move, Oracle is also offering extensive features for social media and data analytics, so ordinary business people can set up corporate Web sites and Facebook pages in minutes and analyze customer responses like Twitter streams.
A supposedly live demonstration of these features by Mr. Ellison apparently consisted of convincing-looking slides, and not the actual system at work. The social analytics were done by Virtue, a company that Oracle announced an intention to buy on May 23.