Don't go away, IBM and SAP – Larry's not finished with you yet SAP and IBM? Pah! Says Larry Ellison. Amazon and Salesforce – them’s my competition these days. Only the truth is a little more nuanced. Yes, there is competitive pressure from the cloud entrants but the more Ellison tries to re-invent Oracle, the more he’s going to have to scrap with his rivals IBM and SAP to haul past the …
Because for doing that they have to... gasp, destroy their current revenue sources. The larger the business, the more inertia it has. The larger their income sources, the more protective of them they become, the more conservative their decisions are and the more "compromise in the middle" their initiatives are. Which leads inevitably to "compromise in the middle" benefits.
Can anyone imagine any existing customers being approached by Oracle or SAP salesmen with the good news that they are going to save money on their annual license fees? Can anyone imagine SAP or Oracle losing any of their hostages to one of their cloud offerings? I can't.
You don't risk your islands, jets, or racing sailboats leaving money from your customers on the table. This is one of the many stages of the dinosaur extinction process.
I think you underestimate Larry's determination to win. If he decides that he needs to kill one part of the organization for another to progress, then that will be what happens. Most organisations work on some compromise of leadership consensus, not Oracle. In Oracle, Larry decides and everyone else follows. This makes for some rough times, but it does allow Oracle to change much more quickly than other organizations of a similar size.
Cloud based ERP? Maybe for HR but for manufacturing no way. I've built systems for production line use and you're lucky if you can get a network connection, internet no way. And, who wants to explain to Mr BMW that they can't produce cars and are losing millions per hour because the internet connection is down?
ERP is what I have done for 20 years and for the past 8 years the move to cloud/remote hosting has been touted as the next big thing. Only just in the past couple of years have I seen customers requesting hosting and now I am seeing public cloud deployment?. So its beginning but still on prem is where the lion's share is.
I work with some massive companies BMW sized and bigger and they are looking and starting on hosting deployments but mixed in with on prem. There are ways of mitigating blackouts on the way you run the software
And also the design of software is changing to allow dodgy internet connections not to bugger everything up.
Yeah.. and I suppose it gets worse. Imagine best laid plans. Google isn't coughing it up but I recall an airline in Minnesota that did the right thing, two separate carriers and then the construction company that cuts through the fibre bundle that is carrying both carriers. Easy prediction: We'll read about a company that went out of business because they were cloudified and the day and a half they were down, the customer abandonment rate was so severe they never recovered. And it will be a cut cable that put them out of business.
"there should have been an offsite DR node which can actually be "cloudy" or not."
Or as i have insisted in a few deployements two cable runs on different sides of the premises. Even if it means digging a new ditch and running your own cable. I have instigated that at two places one is Scotland and another in Poland. The later had a new ditch 5.5km long!
that's what Gartner say too. The quote talks about a 'Hybrid ERP' approach with lots of parts in the cloud but a 'smaller core of on-premise elements such as financials and manufacturing'.
I've no idea if they're right on the wider point they're making, but at least they seem to realise the point you're making about critical systems.
I think what Oracle wants to do is squeeze ever more money out their customers who are currently paying for the server + OS + Oracle software. Oracle only gets the cash from the software and wants to change that ... that is also why they bought Sun. However, it is not working out as well as they expected, plus, IT guyz seem to think it is worthwhile to put all their data into a cloud, thus using competing stacks.
Oracle needs to address that, so they enter the cloud business.
Funny thing is Larry has stock in Salesforce as it is a company created by former Oracle employees ...
The other thing is that all this cloud hype is gonna burst like a bubble ... I have popcorn ready for when major data leaks occur. You have to know as well that NSA is there to help out USian companies where they can and love the idea of a cloud, all that data on competitors of USian companies at the tip of their fingers ...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
