Mark Hurd: Oracle Knows CIOs
The backstory: there’s some sentiment (especially from Information week editors/contributors) surrounding this past Oracle OpenWorld that suggests Mark Hurd and other Oracle executives didn’t demonstrate enough vision. In such a wake, Oracle’s Mark Hurd granted InjformationWeek’s Rob Preston another interview to relay a message that’s refreshing clear and to-the-point: Oracle knows CIOs. Here are the key quips that caught my eye from the interview:
He started by recapping the four prongs of Oracle’s strategy. First, it’s focusing on being best of breed in every layer of the stack: hardware, operating system, database, horizontal and vertical applications. “We want all of those capabilities to be open and work well in heterogeneous environments,” Hurd said, “and we’re lined up from engineering through sales to make that happen.”
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Second, he said, Oracle wants to vertically integrate those pieces to deliver “extremely attractive performance, cost, and, in the end, TCO for customers.” The first manifestation of that strategy was its Exadata database appliance, then its Exalogic middleware machine, and most recently its Exalytics in-memory business intelligence machine and Big Data Appliance. Hurd reiterated Oracle’s claim that the highly tuned Exadata hardware-software combo yields 70x performance improvements–reports that took 70 minutes now take one minute, Hurd said. And those gains can be “dialed in as cost savings for our customers,” he said. “The customer who says it cost me $7 million to do that job before, you can literally take 70x off that and it costs him $100,000.”
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Third, it’s building out its vertical industry expertise, hiring sales and technical support people to help customers in healthcare, retail, financial services, utilities, and other sectors solve their “most strategic and difficult business problems,” Hurd said.
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Fourth, it will deliver applications and infrastructure “any way the customer wants it,” he said. That includes the public cloud–note its recent launch of the Oracle Public Cloud, infrastructure as a service for customers looking to develop Java apps or deploy Oracle Fusion apps in the public cloud. That strategy also includes software as a service, punctuated this week by Oracle’s $1.5 billion deal to acquire RightNow, a leader in customer service SaaS. Oracle will help customers build out private and hybrid clouds as well, or, of course, it will work with them on premises. “You can use the same code base no matter which delivery vehicle you choose,” he said.
Don’t take my word for it. Read the whole thing over at IW GlobalCIO. Very good interview by Preston.
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