Category Archives: Oracle

EMEA, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Oracle, Recruitment

Oracle creating 1,400 new cloud jobs in EMEA

OracleOracle has announced aggressive expansion plans with a recruitment drive for junior and senior sales staff to be based in six cities across EMEA.

The cloud software giant is now actively headhunting for 1,400 new cloud sales staff to work out of sales HQs in Amsterdam, Cairo, Dubai, Dublin, Malaga and Prague. Oracle will be investing in two new cloud sales centres in Amsterdam and Cairo and new offices opening this year in Dubai, Dublin and Prague.

The new initiative follows a multi-billion dollar investment in a new portfolio of cloud computing services which Oracle claiming it now has ‘everything from secure computing infrastructure to enterprise cloud applications’. It currently offers 600 cloud applications to complement its on-premise hardware and software offerings. As enterprises move to hybrid cloud computing models, Oracle says it is now placed to help them manage their overall enterprise computing environment while simplifying the potentially difficult transition to the cloud.

Oracle claims that in the six months since June 2015 it has added nearly 1,500 new software as a service (SaaS) customers and 2,100 platform as a service (PaaS) customers.

Oracle president Loic Le Guisquet, said that though these are ‘exciting times’ for the software giant it will be very cautious about who it selects. “I want socially savvy, switched on individuals who can help customers respond to the digital imperative and make their businesses future proof,” said Le Guisquet, “we’re looking for people who want to be relevant to the biggest trends shaping business and technology.”

Experienced cloud sales staff may soon come at a premium as Oracle admitted it may try to attract staff from other operators. “Recruits may well come from a sales organization within another cloud technology provider,” said a spokesperson.

Other stated targets will be “people with experience in the lines of business we sell to like finance, marketing and HR,” according to Oracle.

Networks, News & Analysis, Oracle

Oracle gets tax breaks to build cloud campus in Texas

OracleOracle has unveiled plans for a technology campus in Austin, Texas in a bid to expand its workforce by 50% in three years. It’s looking for millennials who want to work and live on site and sell cloud computing systems, by creating a combined office and housing complex.

Oracle is also to close its Oregon offices and incorporate the facilities in the new Texas complex. No details were given over staff re-location.

The move is part of a state initiative, including tax breaks and low regulation, as Texas positions itself as a home for innovation and technology. “I will continue to pursue policies that invite the expansion and relocation of tech companies to Texas,” said Texas State Governor Greg Abbott.

The site will include cheap accommodation as Oracle competes for talent in a region with a high concentration of technology start-ups. Its recruitment drive will be aimed at graduates and technical professionals at early stages in their career with the majority of new jobs being created in Oracle’s cloud sales organisation, Oracle Direct.

Oracle is to work with local firms in building the campus, the plans for which include the consolidation of Oracle’s facilities in Oregon. In the first phase it will build a 560,000 square foot complex on the waterfront of Austin’s Lady Bird Lake. It is also building a housing complex next door, with 295 apartments, for employee housing.

Austin’s technology community is teeming with creative and innovative thinkers and the town is a natural choice for investment and growth, claimed Oracle Direct’s Senior VP Scott Armour. “Our campus will inspire, support and attract top talent, with a special focus on the needs of millennials,” said Armour.

Austin’s biggest problems are affordability and mobility, according to Austin’s Mayor Steve Adler. “I look forward to working with Oracle to tackle our biggest challenges,” he said.

Enterprise IT, Financial Results, News & Analysis, Oracle, Platform as a service, Software as a service

Oracle cloud sales boom but at what price?

Oracle plane However Oracle’s co-chief executive Safra Catz warned fiscal 2016 will be “a trough year for profitability as we move to the cloud.”

Oracle’s total revenues were down by 6% to $9.0 billion with the sales of ‘cloud plus on-premise software’ down 4% to $7.0 billion. Meanwhile, total cloud revenue has gone up in the last quarter by 26% (in US dollars) and Oracle made $649 million on pure cloud software. The two most successful categories of cloud software for Oracle have been SaaS and PaaS which accounted for $484 million, a rise of 34%. Cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) revenue was $165 million, a rise of 7%.

Expect the SaaS and PaaS revenue to grow by 50% in Q3 and 60% in Q4, said Catz. According to Oracle it won 100 Fusion Human Capital Management system contracts and over 300 Fusion Enterprise resource planning deals in the last quarter. Oracle said it is on target to sell and book more than $1.5 billion of new SaaS and PaaS business this fiscal year.

“We now have more than 1,500 ERP customers in the cloud, that’s at least ten times more ERP customers than Workday,” said Oracle’s other joint CEO, Mark Hurd. “It was a very strong growth quarter for our cloud business, with SaaS and PaaS bookings up 75% in constant currency and billings up 68% in U.S. dollars.”

Not everyone in Wall Street is convinced however. “While the company is showing some signs of cloud success, the meat and potatoes legacy database and app business is under major secular pressure,” FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives told MarketWatch.

Oracle’s Board of Directors declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.15 per share of outstanding common stock.

cloud exchange, Datacentre, Equinix, News & Analysis, Oracle

Equinix creates direct link to Oracle Cloud Services via Cloud Exchange

CloudData centre operator Equinix has agreed to give its Cloud Exchange users direct access to Oracle Cloud Service, the software vendor’s public platform for infrastructure services.

Equinix claims that Oracle users will get quicker response times and better performance as data is accelerated through its Cloud Exchanges in its Amsterdam, Chicago, London, Singapore, Sydney and Washington data centres.

It should also provide a better framework to support the hybrid cloud systems that most enterprises run, as well as solid support for migrations to the cloud, according to Oracle. “It gives Oracle’s enterprise customers the flexibility to pick the network services best suited to their diverse workloads,” said Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s president of product development.

The Oracle Cloud aims to simplify the building of new applications and migration of existing on-premises applications to the cloud. The Oracle Cloud Platform offers customers and partners the same platform as a service (PaaS) foundation upon which Oracle runs its own software as a service (SaaS) offerings. According to Oracle 19 of the world’s top 20 SaaS providers now use its Cloud service. In October it announced that Oracle Cloud Services it launched 24 additional PaaS and IaaS services.

Oracle’s 400,000 customers include all 100 of the Fortune 100 companies and it has sold 1,000 ERP systems running in the cloud. By offering direct access on Equinix Cloud Exchange, Oracle said it can create much faster connections between the on-premise systems many companies still use and the Oracle public cloud.

“The addition of Oracle Cloud to Equinix Cloud Exchange helps our customers execute on their business strategies,” said Equinix CEO Steve Smith.

Cloud is the fastest growing part of Oracle’s business. It supports 62 million users and 23 billion transactions each day. Oracle Cloud runs on 30,000 devices and 400 petabytes of storage in 19 data centres around the world.

Datacentre, IBM, Intel, News & Analysis, OpenWorld 2015, Oracle, server

Oracle and Intel announce plans to ramp up the offensive on IBM in the cloud

Oracle openworld 2015Intel and Oracle are to build on a previous collaboration which saw them jointly take on IBM in the cloud computing hardware market. Now they are conspiring again, this time to target Oracle’s database and software customers, in a bid to get them to ditch their IBM computer servers and buy Oracle/Intel servers instead.

The new pact was announced at the opening of Oracle’s tech conference as Intel CEO Brian Krzanich took the stage of Sunday with Oracle CEO Mark Hurd. Project Apollo, in which the two manufacturers pooled engineers in a joint bid to investigate how massive cloud computing data centres can run faster using Oracle hardware with Intel chips, was pronounced mission accomplished.

On Sunday Hurd and Krzanich announced the new hardware partnership and a back up conversion programme. Oracle CEO Mark Hurd said ‘thousands’ of customers have dropped IBM for Oracle when running Oracle software. To back this up, Oracle launched a migration support programme. The ‘Exa Your Power Program’ (EYP) is aimed to help customers move their Oracle Database from IBM Power systems to Oracle Engineered Systems using Intel technology.

The EYP is a free database migration Proof of Concept study in which Oracle will assess a customer’s environment, create a database migration results report and show how it thinks the customer could significantly cut the time and costs of running critical database workloads.

“CSC has successfully migrated dozens of customers’ enterprise workloads,” said Ashish Mahadwar, Executive General Manager of Oracle’s Emerging Business Group. “We recently migrated an Oracle Database for a major insurance provider from IBM Power 7 to an Exadata X5 engineered system as a Proof of Concept.”

Mahadwar claimed that test results showed a Siebel Application runs four-to-ten times faster and ETL Processes running up to 12-times faster on Exadata.

Transformation of the enterprise is already underway with the continuous improvements in a vast software ecosystem that Intel and Oracle jointly deliver according to Mahadwar. “The Exa Your Power program will make it easier for customers to realize the benefits of moving to Intel architecture,” said Mahadwar.

Analytics, CSPs, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Oracle, software, Telco Cloud

Oracle launches Communications Analytics portfolio

OracleEnterprise software giant Oracle has unveiled a new product portfolio called Oracle Communications Analytics, a business intelligence suite aimed at communications providers.

The portfolio is a combination pre-existing products and four new ones: Oracle Communications Customer Experience Analytics, Oracle Communications Network Assurance Analytics, Oracle Communications Analytics Big Data Platform, and Oracle Communications Analytics Diameter Adapter.

The Customer Experience Analytics application is designed to offer customer care people a bunch of useful analytical information in one place. The Network Assurance Analytics app offers insights into Diameter network performance, while the Analytics Big Data Platform pretty much does what it says on the tin and the Big Data Adapters are tools designed to feed in that big data.

“CSPs have an advantage – they have a lot of data about how their network operates and the kinds of experiences that customers are having,” said Doug Suriano, GM of Oracle Communications. “But without the right big data and analytics tools, the data will remain unused and siloed in various systems. Our expanded Oracle Communications Analytics portfolio is designed with this challenge in mind, offering the broader Oracle expertise in big data as well as the industry-specific understanding of the communications market.”

“As the telecommunications industry accelerates its rate of change, it’s critical that CSPs leverage and monetize their network, service, and customer information,” said Clare McCarthy, practice leader, Telecom Operations and IT, Ovum. “To do so, they must first design analytics solutions that address their business problems in real time—and integrate them with existing data warehouse and analytics solutions. The latest releases of Oracle Communications Analytics products respond to this need and can provide value to CSPs looking to advance their big data and analytics efforts.”

News & Analysis, Oracle, procurement, Public Sector, uk government

Ministry of Justice has made no savings at all from cloud strategy claims report

The UK Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has saved nothing from its cloud strategy as the department still buys 2.3 million licenses, reports The Register. According to the report, a government insider said Oracle is “extreme in its defence of existing licensing” and “stopping any flexibility.”

A freedom of information (FOI) request forced the MoJ to reveal that it buys 53 separate Oracle products including 961,000 internet expense licences, 250,000 licenses for each of three human resources systems and 100,000 payroll licences.

With 3,000 staff at the MoJ’s headquarters, that would average around 767 licenses for each employee. If all staff employed by the MoJ’s partner agencies were considered, then 33 Oracle licences have been bought for each of a total of 70,000 staff.

The MoJ transferred its people, services and IT to the Cabinet Office-run shared services centre in November last year. The FOI response revealed there had been no licensing cost savings yet to be associated with the move, since the licences are held in perpetuity and do not expire. The Technology Oracle Support and Maintenance Shared Services Oracle Support contracts will expire in April 2016, which could save £100m over the lifetime of the shared services centre contract.

The MoJ has refused to disclose the total it is spending on Oracle software, claiming this is a matter of commercial confidentiality.

The MoJ needs to review its use of Oracle, said analyst Clive Longbottom, senior researcher at Quocrica. “If the ministry being held to ransom by Oracle, through the systems integrators and consultants that the government insists on using, then it’s time to insist on a replacement database,” said Longbottom.

The analyst argued that Microsoft or IBM would be ‘more than willing’ to help the MoJ to move them over to their systems. A more nuanced data storage platform using a non-relational database alongside Hadoop could save them a lot on Oracle licences. “Oracle fights to the death to look after its licence revenues,” said Longbottom. “It is still in a legal battle with Rimini Street over how the third party support vendor manages Oracle licensing.”

News & Analysis, Oracle, PaaS, Platform as a service, Quarterlies, quarterly results, Saas, Software as a service

Software and platforms as a service driving our growth says Oracle

OracleOracle’s latest quarterly results show the increasing strategic of importance of revenue from cloud software and platforms as a service, according to the vendor. Chairman Larry Ellison also claimed the sales figures show Oracle will soon overtake Salesforce as the top selling cloud operator.

The official figures for Oracle’s fiscal 2016 Q1 period show that total revenues were $8.4 billion, which represent a two per cent fall in US dollars but a seven per cent rise in constant currency. Oracle attributed the fall to the current strength of the US dollar.

However, a clearer pattern emerged in the nature of software sales, when benchmarking all sales in US dollars. While revenues for on premise software were down two per cent (in US dollars) at $6.5 billion, the total cloud revenues were up by 29 per cent at $611 million. The revenue from Cloud software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) was $451 million, which represents a 34 per cent increase in sales. Cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) revenues, at $160 million, rose 16 per cent in the same period.

Meanwhile, Oracle’s total hardware revenue figure for the period, $1.1 billion, also indicated a decline, of three per cent. Using the same US dollar benchmark, Oracle’s services revenues for the period more or less stagnated, at $862 million, a rise of one per cent.

Growth is being driven by SaaS and PaaS, according to Oracle CEO Safra Catz. “Cloud subscription contracts almost tripled in the quarter,” said Catz, “as our cloud business scales-up, we plan to double our SaaS and PaaS cloud margins over the next two years. Rapidly growing cloud revenue combined with a doubling of cloud margins will have a huge impact on growth going forward.”

Oracle’s cloud revenue growth rate is being driven by a year-over-year bookings rise of over 150 per cent in Q1, reported Oracle’s other joint CEO Mark Hurd. “Our increasing revenue growth rate is in sharp contrast to our primary cloud competitor’s revenue growth rates, which are on their way down.”

Oracle is still on target to book up to $2.0 billion of new SaaS and PaaS business this fiscal year, claimed executive chairman Larry Ellison. “That means Oracle would sell between 50 per cent more and double the amount of new cloud business that Salesforce plans to sell in their current fiscal year. Oracle is the world’s second largest SaaS and PaaS company, but we are rapidly closing in on number one.”

EasyJet, HSBC, Lacoste, M&A, marketing cloud, Maxymiser, News & Analysis, Oracle, Software as a service, Thomas Kurian, Tim Brown

Oracle boost marketing cloud biz with Maxymiser acquisition

Oracle is buying Maxymiser to boost its marketing capabilities

Oracle is buying Maxymiser to boost its marketing capabilities

Oracle has acquired Maxymiser, a provider of cloud-based marketing tools, for an undisclosed sum. The company said the acquisition will bolster its marketing cloud portfolio.

Founded in 2006, Maxymiser has over 400 employees and offers a range of cloud-based marketing tools that help its users improve customer experience and user retention through omnichannel analysis and marketing automation. Some of its higher profile customers include EasyJet, HSBC and French clothing retailer Lacoste.

Its offerings will be integrated into the Orcale Marketing Cloud, which is itself made up of a range of tools formerly acquired by the firm (Eloqua and Responsys for instance), following the acquisition.

“Companies are increasingly seeking innovative ways to differentiate their brands while increasing both ROI and loyalty based on optimized customer experiences,” said Thomas Kurian, president, product development, Oracle. “Together with Maxymiser, Oracle Marketing Cloud enables enterprises to stop guessing and start delivering what customers want across all digital channels and devices.”

Tim Brown, chief executive officer, Maxymiser said: “Our mission is to empower enterprises to use data science to systematically test, discover, and predict what customers want and deliver uniquely tailored experiences. We are excited to join Oracle and bring these capabilities to help extend Oracle Marketing Cloud.”

Over the years many large incumbents like Oracle and SAP as well as newer upstarts like Salesforce have moved quickly to strengthen their position in marketing automation through acquisition. In April this year NetSuite acquired Bronto Software, a provider of cloud-based marketing automation software for omnichannel commerce, in a deal worth about $200m.

Docker, Markus Flierl, News & Analysis, Open Source, Oracle

Oracle latest legacy firm to support Docker

Oracle is adding support for Docker to Solaris

Oracle is adding support for Docker to Solaris

Oracle said this week that it would bring Docker support to Solaris, becoming the latest legacy software vendor to add support for the open source Linux container technology.

While Solaris has had support for Linux containers in the form of ‘Solaris Zones’ (Oracle’s virtual machine technology) for nearly a decade, the move will see Oracle enable Docker to be deployed within those ‘Zones’ (VMs).

The company also said it plans to make some of its software – Oracle WebLogic Server was the only one specifically mentioned – available for deployment and testing as full Docker images on Solaris.

“Today’s announcement really gives developers the best of both worlds – access to Oracle Solaris’ enterprise class security, resource isolation and superior analytics with the ability to easily create containers in dev/test, production and cloud environments,” said Markus Flierl, vice president, Oracle Solaris Core Technology.

“Integrating Docker into Oracle Solaris will make that even easier and will help customers benefit from highly integrated compute on premises and in the cloud,” Flierl said.

Laurent Lachal, senior analyst, infrastructure solutions at Ovum said the move is a win-win for those planning to move to more cloud-native technologies like OpenStack and Linux containers but still depend heavily on different components of the Oracle stack.

Oracle is the latest legacy software vendor to open up to Docker.

Late last year Windows announced it would support the container technology in Windows Server 2016, around the same time IBM announced it would provide a Docker-based container service through Bluemix, the company’s platform as a service offering.

Given how embedded Oracle is in large organisations the move could see Docker gain more traction in the traditional large enterprise, potentially a big win for the young open source container project.