Oracle is forcing to deploy in the cloud

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The calm waters of Lake Colorado, just steps from its offices, litter the shore. Some Virginia oaks stretch their branches. But you have to be careful with sleeping water. Based at its new headquarters in Austin, Oracle is preparing for the future of its software in the cloud era. Based on California history, the company moved to Texas last year, on the shores of Lady Bird, one of the downtown reservoir lakes. Under the building’s large opaque windows, sales teams are already working.

The purchase of this large campus demonstrates the ambition of the group, which is already worth 200 billion dollars in the stock market and employs 132,000 people worldwide. Founded by Larry Ellison, the leader in management software tackled the cloud market by investing 12 billion dollars over two years to catch up. A strategy that is beginning to bear fruit. “Oracle’s two cloud activities now represent 25% of its turnover with an annual rate of 10 billion dollars”, explains Safra Catz, its CEO since 2019. The former financial director raised the company’s margins and set a clear course. “By the end of the year, we should go from 37 to 44 data centers around the world,” explains Régis Louis, one of the pillars of this strategy in Europe and Asia-Pacific. The vice president wants to make Oracle one of the major players on the continent. After Marseille, the second data center will be held on June 20, in Ile-de-France.

The Oracle name has long been associated with its management software and databases. Large businesses have turned to Oracle to organize their financial, accounting, and human resources data. One area where competition has increased since the emergence of Salesforce or Labor Day and the rise of German SAP applications. Enough to force Oracle to multiply acquisitions like that of Cerner, the medical data manager, in December, to $ 28.3 billion. Its largest operation since taking over PeopleSoft in 2004.

Diversify your income

In the latest results, in March, Larry Ellison was pleased to bring in new customers, including banks such as Société Générale and soon BNP Paribas. In France, Oracle prides itself on having Crédit Agricole’s integrated financial data on the bank’s servers. A strategy presented by the group, which says it can run its software on the customer’s premises as well as on its servers – in this case, Sun Micro -systems, acquired by Oracle in 2010. “Our customers’ data will always remain hidden in the data center of their choice ”, maintained Christophe Négrier, who was appointed in January director of Oracle France.

But, to grow even bigger, the giant also wants to put digital gold in safes that it deploys anywhere. “Oracle wants to bring some of its customers to its own infrastructure,” said Gérald Karsenti, former director of Oracle France, who left the company before moving to SAP. A strategy that will allow it to be more agile and diversify its revenue share. “Oracle left earlier than others in this activity, confirmed Chris Pang, an analyst at Gartner. In terms of market share, its cloud activity in 2020 remained behind (1.5%) hyperscaler like Amazon’s AWS (41%), Microsoft’s Azure (20%), or Alibaba (10%). “

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