What could go wrong for Oracle…
There is a flaw though with this plan. While Oracle will no doubt see an increase in revenue from PaaS and IaaS, it is in SaaS that the battle needs to be won as well. Should Oracle be worried if customers turn to Salesforce, Workday and Netsuite? Actually not totally.
Both Salesforce and Netsuite currently use Oracle for their database back end solutions, and Netsuite is using Exadata already. It is interesting that Oracle, and especially Larry Ellison has almost all bets covered. Even if revenues from Oracle ERP fade, the IaaS and PaaS revenues should increase, while not in an equal amount they will at least offset some of the losses.
Conclusion
There are still a lot of announcements likely to be made at OpenWorld 2015, however the question of whether this announcement couple with the recent partner announcement around Cloud registered partners will see Oracle growing as an IaaS cloud provider is an interesting one. If Oracle cannot realise in the short term revenues from ERP solutions in the cloud, and the lead times for those projects is likely to be immense, as the recent SAP announcement around migrating Lloyds Register from Oracle to SAP Cloud indicates (2 years), this push into IaaS will be welcome by shareholders.
No doubt there will be some cloud ERP and SaaS announcements but at the moment it seems as though Oracle has a clear focus in the IaaS and PaaS market.
