Oracle circa 2010
Larry Ellison wasn’t present at the Oracle Fusion event where he was supposed to take questions from the audience and talk about Oracle 2010, but the presidential Charles Phillips filled in. At the end of the Fusion presentation, Phillips described Ellison’s vision for Oracle in 2010 as follows:
- More secure infrastructure that leverages commodity storage and servers
- Standards-based application suite
- Applications leader in key industries
- Leader in business intelligence
- Leading in both structured and unstructured data
- Leading in on-demand company
- More subscription business
The on demand, more subscription revenue part seems new, but expected. I asked Phillips after the presentation about Oracle's on demand strategy. He said that Oracle generates about $200 million in on-demand revenue, with around 500 customers paying 150 per month (per subscriber) for Oracle hosted HR and financial applications. Oracle has a hosting center in Austin, Texas. Siebel will also bring some on-demand customers for its CRM application. Ellison also owns most of NetSuite, a hosted application suites for smaller businesses, as well as a chunk of salesforce.com. This may be the year that Oracle gets serious about the on-demand, software-as-a-service model. The Fusion architecture will aid that effort, but that's a few years out.