Mark knows his days at Oracle are numbered, By Ahmed Azmi

By Ahme Azmi

CEO claims Oracle is No. 1 in ‘enterprise’ cloud sales, but it’s not true

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mark-knows-his-days-oracle-numbered-ahmed-azmi?trk=hp-feed-article-title-share

Mark knows his days at Oracle are numbered and he is desperate. Mark and Safra’s lack of industry vision turned Oracle into a holding financial entity not a technology company. Buying revenue and customers by acquisition only amplifies the company’s market perception as a tech laggard who is unable to innovate. Blind cost cutting depleted Oracle’s talent pool and left many high-profile accounts enraged without the seasoned, knowledgeable experts they relied on for so many years as trusted advisors.

Oracle, THE database & the JAVA company, missed the most important shifts in their core technology over the past decade:

• Oracle missed the CLOUD wave despite owning JAVA. What did Oracle do with JAVA in the last 7 years? NOTHING. To date, Oracle has not developed a compelling container or micro-services strategy. Larry ridiculed cloud computing and held back the company’s cloud transformation for so many crucial years. Today, AWS has a 10 year lead over Oracle and no amount of spending can compress AWS’s deep expertise and knowledge acquired over a decade of experimentation, innovation, and refinement.

• Oracle missed the BIG DATA wave: Hadoop, NoSQL, and the big data ecosystem all originated and commercialized elsewhere (Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Apache) not Oracle. THE database company should have been THE BIG DATA company but it turns out that data companies not software vendors are the ones who understood the use cases and the ones who productized and commercialised their home-grown tech.

• Oracle missed the MACHINE LEARNING and AI wave. Again, an astounding failure to innovate in a data-driven technology. This is where Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are leading and building market making data products and services.

Buying revenue by acquisition and cutting costs may fix financials in the short term (long enough for Mark and Safra to cash yet another year’s bonus and stock option). But why should Oracle spend a single Dollar on R&D then if all they do is acquire?