By Brian Womack
(Bloomberg) — Oracle Corp. Executive Chairman Larry Ellison said his company will continue its push into the cloud while noting the industry still has much room to grow.
Leadership in the field remained up for grabs with the biggest cloud-only businesses still relatively small — none at around $100 billion, Ellison said, probably referring to annual sales. Oracle now counts relatively newer entrants such as Amazon.com Inc, Workday Inc. and Microsoft Corp. among its most formidable competitors, the company’s billionaire founder said on Sunday.
“This is how much our world has changed,” Ellison said during a keynote at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. “We no longer pay any attention” to traditional competitors SAP SE and International Business Machines Corp. “It is quite a shock.”
Oracle is investing in the cloud as the company comes under growing pressure from rivals that deliver software via connections over the Internet. It is now rolling out new products that touch many different parts of its lineup, including applications and tools for customers in e-commerce and manufacturing.
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While this shift helps the company break into new markets, it’s also hampering Oracle’s traditional business of selling licenses for software installed on corporate systems.
“We are in the middle — and I really do mean in the middle — of a general shift in computing that is no less important than shift onto personal computing,” he said. “It seems like early days.”
In recent years, Oracle had battled Salesforce.com Inc. in the cloud and raced to beat SAP and IBM. Oracle has been redesigning its products so that they can be sold and delivered over the Internet to keep up with the transformation in the broader enterprise technology industry, where companies are increasing spending on cloud services from providers such as Amazon, Workday and Microsoft.
