I just got back from a press tour in New York, where the most common question I heard was: What's Oracle's competitive advantage in the cloud? I believe it's the completeness of our offering. Here's why.
The three main components of the cloud are the application, platform, and infrastructure layers. But most enterprises don't think about the cloud in terms of these silos. They take a single, holistic view of their problems and how to solve them.
Because we play in all layers of the cloud—and are continually adding integrations between the layers—we are in a unique position to help.
The application layer refers to software such as enterprise resource planning, human capital management, supply chain management, and customer engagement. These are core applications that enterprises rely on to run their businesses. Oracle is the established leader in this area, and we're continuing to innovate and differentiate by integrating artificial intelligence, blockchain, and other important new technologies into these applications.
These applications sit on the platform layer, which is powered by the Oracle Autonomous Database. We've taken our 40-plus years of expertise and combined it with advanced machine learning technologies to create the market's only self-driving and self-repairing database.
The platform layer is also where our analytics, security, and integration capabilities live. Analytics are helping businesses answer questions they couldn't answer before—and ask new questions they never would have thought of. And security, which used to be seen as an inhibitor to cloud adoption, is actually now a driver. Enterprises are saying, "Oracle's data center is going to be more secure than what we can manage on our own."
The application and platform layers rest upon Oracle's Generation 2 Cloud Infrastructure. Our compute, storage, and networking capabilities are purpose-built to run new types of workloads in a more secure and performant way than our competitors. We plan to open 20 Oracle Cloud data centers by the end of next year, which works out to one new data center every 23 days. And we're hiring 2,000 new people to support this infrastructure business.
Another differentiator for Oracle is our commitment to openness and interoperability in the cloud. As an example, we have a very strategic relationship with Microsoft. Joint customers can migrate to the cloud, build net new applications and even do things like run Microsoft analytics on top of an Oracle Database. We've also announced a collaboration with VMware to help customers run vSphere workloads in Oracle Cloud and to support Oracle software running on VMware.
We live in a hybrid and multicloud world. Oracle's comprehensive cloud offering, combined with our interoperability and multicloud support, helps customers achieve outcomes they simply couldn't with other vendors.
Watch Steve Daheb discuss the Oracle Cloud advantage on Cheddar and Yahoo Finance.
