Oracle: Winning cloud perception game with IT buyers

Oracle appears to be winning the cloud ground wars as IT buyer perception appears to be shifting its way, according to a Piper Jaffray survey of CIOs.

Piper Jaffray's 2015 CIO report had 71 respondents and found that spending priorities are shifting toward cloud computing. For instance, 97 percent of CIOs plan to increase or maintain spending on cloud related projects. For on-premise deployments, 80 percent of CIOs would maintain or increase spending. Twenty percent of CIOs said they would cut on-premise spending.

Also: Oracle gets its cloud due: Can it sustain it? | Oracle's Larry Ellison talks cloud catch-up game with Salesforce.com

The takeaway from Piper Jaffray analyst Katherine Egbert is that Oracle's large menu of products is helping it. She upgraded the stock following the survey and Oracle's strong results of late. She said:

Oracle was cited by a wide margin as the vendor most likely to benefit from private cloud spending, with 2x the mentions of second-place Salesforce. We note that Oracle was cited as the #1 vendor for cloud, in an environment with increasing cloud spending, but with a hesitancy to put critical systems like ERP into an off-premise model. Oracle's suite approach seems to be serving them well.

Simply put, Oracle appears to be able to manage the cloud transition well and can benefit from hybrid enterprise approaches.

The caveat to these results is how much Oracle's recent quarterly results colored perceptions. After a series of quarterly misses, Oracle hurdled low expectations and talked up its cloud game. Should Oracle's February quarter deliver then it should hold on to its cloud perception. Should Oracle bomb again, there will be questions.

Nevertheless, Piper's survey is a positive data point for Oracle. And if you're tracking the Oracle vs. SAP battle, the former appears to be winning the cloud mind share game for the moment. CIOs cited ERP, security, business intelligence and big data and e-commerce as top 2015 priorities.

Here's a look at the money charts: