Oracle CEO Mark Hurd confident of doubling SaaS revenue from existing clients

As the $125 billion applications market moves to the cloud, Mark Hurd, chief executive officer of California-headquartered Oracle, said the company’s move to shift customers of its applications on premise to the cloud alone will help it double its revenue to $22 billion.

The company has been aggressive in moving its customers from on-premise to its SaaS model.

“The move from on premise to software-as-a-service (SaaS) increases the revenue generated from support by moving the data centre, storage and others,” said Hurd, adding that beyond the top two SaaS companies, the rest had market shares less than 3%.

“We see a long list of under-funded competitors with a market share of 1% to 2% and do not have the capabilities to invest in research and development. There is a long-tail of companies and the market will see consolidation,” said Hurd during a session at the Oracle Media Day at the company’s headquarters.

Commenting on SAP chief executive officer Bill McDermott’s announcement to reduce its reliance on Oracle’s infrastructure last month, Hurd said that “the changes to work flows will have to be re-done and some of the customers being subjected to re-platforming will face tens and hundreds of million dollar costs”.

Citing IDC's Public Cloud Services Tracker for April 2019, Hurd said Oracle gained the most market share globally out of all enterprise applications SaaS vendors three years running -- in 2016, 2017 and 2018.

However, a survey of Oracle licensees, conducted by global provider of enterprise software products and services Rimini Street Inc. and released on May 1, 80% respondents remained unsure of moving to Oracle’s SaaS offerings.

On the use of new technologies including artificial intelligence, blockchain, machine learning and industrial intelligence, Hurd said that the company is looking at innovative ways of delivering these solutions built into its applications.

Oracle has more than 1,100 cloud applications and nearly 20,500 ERP (enterprise resource planning) customers.

The author attended the Oracle Media Day in California at the company's invitation.