Businesses are struggling under the weight of massive “technical debt,” the cost and complexity of having to manage decades-old computer hardware and highly customized software, all housed in expensive company-owned data centers.
This shift to the cloud benefits both Oracle and its customers, Hurd said, offering a software-as-a-service example:of on-premises back-office applications, the company generates $3 or $4 of revenue from its cloud applications “because the customer is also moving their data centers to us, their storage, their database, middleware, and hardware,” he explained. “We wind up doing more for them than before, so we gain share with each customer.
“It’s about being able to grow your business and take advantage of the technology. That’s the consistent benefit we see when we look at the ROI of cloud,” Wettemann said. “In the marketing sense, I’m able to do more campaigns and have more effective campaigns with fewer resources. With sales, I can put those intelligent assistants in place and grow revenue without a commensurate growth in sales operations.
“The market is very fragmented,” Hurd noted. “The biggest player in the back-office market only has a 24% share in the on-prem world.”