Oracle; Taryn Colbert/Business Insider
- Oracle is known as a major enterprise IT player, but it has struggled for a bigger presence in the fast-growing cloud market which is dominated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
- These 12 executives are leading Oracle’s bid to expand its reach in cloud computing.
- They are focused on leveraging Oracle’s strengths in database, security and applications to gain a bigger piece of the cloud market.
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Oracle has been known as an enterprise tech powerhouse for more than 40 years, but the Silicon Valley giant is viewed as a minor player in what has become a critical arena of that market: the cloud.
This was underscored recently in the battle over the Pentagon’s JEDI cloud project. In affirming its decision to reject Oracle’s bid and name Microsoft and Amazon as the finalists for the $10 billion public cloud contract, the Pentagon said, "Oracle is not in the same class as Microsoft and Amazon Web Services."
Oracle is a top vendor in cloud software, but in the broader cloud market, it has struggled against rivals like Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
One problem is that it’s been hard for Oracle, which was launched in 1977, to break away from the old ways of selling software to enterprises, which is involves hefty licensing agreements and maintenance fees, said analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group.
"Oracle’s leadership doesn’t know the cloud," he told Business Insider. "The top leadership of Oracle is largely living in the 1980s from the standpoint of the business model, and that model doesn’t appear to work for cloud businesses."
That’s probably a key reason why the company founded by billionaire Larry Ellison, who is now the company’s chief technology officer, has turned to some outsiders — including from rivals that now dominate the cloud, like Amazon and Microsoft — in its bid for a bigger presence in the cloud.
This push is so critical for the company that many of these executives on this list — which is based on input from analysts, news coverage of the company and from Oracle itself — report to Ellison himself.
Here are 12 executives leading Oracle’s cloud offensive:
Edward Screven has been with Oracle since 1986 and is chief corporate architect
Oracle
Title: Chief Corporate Architect
Reports to: Founder and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison
Edward Screven, who joined Oracle in 1986, has seen the company navigate the major tech waves of the past 30 years. Today, that wave is the cloud, a trend that critics say Oracle was late to embrace, and which is now dominated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
"We definitely started after Amazon," he told Business Insider in an interview in May. "The bad news is they have market share. The good news is we get to learn a lot."
Oracle also has a lot going for it, he says. Founded in 1977, the Silicon Valley company is an enterprise IT powerhouse whose database and business applications technologies are used by hundreds of thousands of businesses throughout the world.
Screven says Oracle is building a cloud infrastructure that offers more security and more sophisticated and efficient ways to manage data.
"We have hundreds of thousands of customers that store their most important data in Oracle databases," Screven, who reports to Oracle founder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison, said. "We could do a far better job for them than any other cloud provider. We are doing a far better job for them."
Amazon may dominate the cloud today, but Oracle is well-positioned to catch up, Screven suggested.
"Mindshare, that may be their biggest asset," he said. "But there is no technology they have that is concerning to me at all."
Analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group points to a downside to Screven’s standing as an Oracle veteran: "Screven isn’t a cloud guy, he is an Oracle guy, and when you are driving disruption, you need a subject matter expert for that disruption. Edward is a loyalist instead, and while that makes sense from a command and control perspective, given Oracle’s leadership doesn’t know the cloud either, this will work against the success of the effort. "
Steve Daheb left Citrix to lead Oracle’s cloud marketing strategy
Oracle
Title: Senior Vice President, Cloud Go-to-Market
Reports to: Founder and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison
Changing the perception that Oracle is a minor player in the cloud is one of the tech giant’s major problems. And this is where Steve Daheb comes in.
Daheb joined Oracle in 2015 after serving as chief marketing officer of Citrix, one of the pioneers of the cloud, which let businesses set up computing networks on web-based platforms, instead of on-premise data centers, leading to dramatic IT cost-savings.
Daheb also saw including the unexpected rise of Amazon as the king of cloud computing.
In the early 2000s, the tech behemoth, known for selling pretty much everything online realized it could make some extra money by money by giving businesses access to its massive, but under-utilized, computing infrastructure, hosted from its data centers. The led to Amazon Web Services, which went on to dominate the cloud market.
Daheb compares to Amazon’s ascent in the cloud to the rise of Airbnb: "Amazon had spare computing resources to rent out. It’s like, ‘Hey man, I got an extra room in the house during the summer when it’s not spike retail time. There’s nobody in there, so why don’t I put thing on AirBnb and see if anybody wants it."
Like others on the Oracle team, he thinks the Redwood City, California-based software giant’s technology and track record working with major players and industries will eventually propel it to the top of the cloud.
"There’s a level of understanding we have, and there’s a level of empathy we have for enterprise users," he said. "We serve the major banks. We serve transportation. We serve health care … We brought this enterprise mentality to it."
Juergen Lindner left SAP to lead Oracle’s software-as-a-service marketing strategy
Oracle
Title: Senior Vice President, Software-as-a-Service Marketing
Reports to: Dave Donatelli, Executive Vice President, Cloud Business Group
Juergen Lindner spent most of his career helping SAP outsell Oracle in the enterprise software market. He decided to join Oracle three years ago when he said he became more impressed with the Silicon Valley giant’s strategy in adapting to a major shift in the way corporations bought and used software.
SAP and Oracle dominated the market where businesses paid hefty licensing and maintenance fees for software applications that were installed in their private data centers.
That changed with the rise of software-as-a-service when businesses accessed applications through cloud platforms and paid for software via a subscription, usually based on the number of users to whom they want to grant access. This allowed companies to cut costs dramatically.
This posed a problem for traditional software vendors like SAP and Oracle which scrambled to adapt to the new market. Lindner said it became clear to him that Oracle had a better strategy for the cloud software era.
"Oracle has architected a very sustainable cloud infrastructure and applications strategy," largely because the company "has been serving customers for a long time," he told Business Insider.
Analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group said bringing Lindner in was a smart move, saying: "There is a strong match between skillset and the job he has been selected to do. He should be an asset to the team."
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
See Also:
- Top Oracle execs Larry Ellison, Mark Hurd and Safra Catz failed to earn all of their annual bonuses this year
- The saga of MapR, a Google-backed startup that raised $280 million, ends with the sale of its assets to HPE — and it could signal the end of an era for big data
- Software intelligence company Dynatrace soared 49% on its first day of trading. Its top execs explain how a ‘technology refresh’ helped the company grow.
Source: Business Insider – bpimentel@businessinsider.com (Benjamin Pimentel)