Oracle Keeps Saying it Can beat Salesforce and AWS, but Numbers Say Otherwise

Oracle Corp. Believes it can beat Salesforce.com Inc. and challenge Amazon Web Services, but the numbers do not seem to support that swagger.

Oracle ORCL, -0.05% gave an update on its 10 million career with Salesforce CRM, -1.54% on Thursday, showing revenues from its cloud business surpassed 1,000 billion for the first time the second fiscal quarter, Thanks to 62% - year-on-year. In the first half of fiscal 2017, Oracle reported $ 2 billion in total cloud revenues, at a rate of 61%, figures that include your company's infrastructure as a growth service.

Salesforce, which was founded as a cloud software company, recorded quarterly revenues of $ 2.14 billion in its most recent quarter, with a 25% growth rate. CEO Marc Benioff Salesforce recently predicted that over 10,000 million turnover for fiscal year 2018, projected a rate of about 21% growth.


Oracle must have its fastest growth rate to reach US $ 10 billion in the first place, but continue to grow cloud revenues even at the rate of about 60% will not get there before Salesforce.

"We can beat them at the $ 10 billion mark, but it will be close," said Larry Ellison, co-founder and CEO of Oracle, in a conference call on Thursday. "We are reaching out to them, Let's reach out for them very quickly. "

This account is also the infrastructure company as Oracle service, which is actually not a "software" cloud, but offers remote computing power Amazon.com AMZN like, -1.02% Amazon Web Services. Ellison also took a fight with AWS this year, a challenge in his annual OpenWorld introductory speech, but Oracle seems far behind in this battle.

Oracle cloud services increased by 6% to $ 175 million in the second quarter, while AWS increased by 55% to 3.23 billion in its most recent quarter. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said he expected AWS to reach $ 10 billion in annual sales this year.

Again, Ellison did not back away from a fight that Oracle seems unlikely to win directly.

"[The IaaS offer] is very, very well received," he said. "Of course, the real test is how can we do better than Amazon? ... And we think we can. And that will make us very, very competitive. "

Oracle seems more likely to face the AWS Amazon pressure rather than the reverse. AWS is launching new software products at an incredible pace, and can give customers who use their remote servers break the price on the growing number of software packages offered.

Oracle has made tremendous progress in the cloud, thanks to a wave of acquisitions have resulted in the recent agreement of 9,300 million for NetSuite. He even said Thursday that sellers no longer receive commissions for the sale of local software applications, but employ small sales teams "SWAT" working with existing customers to add to existing contracts.

The progress made by Oracle seems less impressive, however, when it comes to fighting opponents who have focused on the cloud for longer and have a great advantage. Despite all its swaggering and spin, Oracle still has a long way to go.