Top 10 Challenges Facing Larry Ellison as Oracle CTO

A lot of sound and fury that ultimately signifies nothing was generated this week as Larry Ellison announced he would be abdicating the role of CEO in favor of being Oracle (ORCL) chairman and CTO. In his place, Safra Catz and Mark Hurd will take the leadership reins.

That news obviously went a long way to shift attention away from a disappointing financial quarter that affected both Oracle and its channel partners alike. The challenges facing Oracle and its partners, however, go well beyond corporate structure. At almost every turn Oracle is being challenged on a core technology, and unless Oracle finds some way to firmly re-establish its leadership, chances are many quarters to come are likely to be equally disappointing.

The top 10 challenges, I believe, facing Larry Ellison as the CTO of Oracle are:

JavaScript: The rise of frameworks such as Node.js based on JavaScript, JSON and RESTful application programming interfaces running on both the client and the server means Java no longer holds as much sway as it once did. As a result, much of the application development conversation is moving away from a core Oracle strength.

In-Memory Computing: SAP has used its HANA in-memory computing platform to make a case for eliminating the need for the core Oracle RDBMS. Oracle has responded with an in-memory computing option. But SAP and, to a lesser degree, Microsoft have established thought leadership in terms of how databases will evolve in the enterprise.

NoSQL Databases: Although most so-called NoSQL databases make use of SQL, none of them are based on traditional relational database technology. As the leading proponent of relational database technology, Oracle’s response thus far has been tepid. Oracle has developed some of its own NoSQL databases and partnered with Cloudera on Hadoop. But that’s a long way from treating NoSQL databases on a par with relational databases.

Analytics: One of the hottest categories in all of enterprise software, Oracle remains solidly focused on data warehouses that were designed primarily to support legacy business intelligence applications rather than next-generation predictive analytics applications.

SaaS Applications: Like it or not, core functions of the enterprise resource planning (ERP) application suite that accounts for so much of Oracle’s revenues are being picked off by best-of-breed software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

Cloud Computing: Oracle arguably has one of the richest portfolios in terms of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-a-service (PaaS) and SaaS offerings. It also sports an impressive array of middleware technologies. Nevertheless, Oracle is being overshadowed in the cloud by everyone from Amazon and Google to Microsoft, Salesforce.com and IBM. Worse yet, in terms of new initiatives such as OpenStack, Oracle is all but absent.

Open Source Software: The success of open source software so far has been pretty much confined to operating systems. But it’s clear that open source is gaining momentum well beyond the scope of the MySQL database that Oracle acquired.

The Software-Defined Enterprise: For all intents and purposes, Oracle is mute on the subject—even though it claims the future of enterprise IT will be defined by the convergence of hardware and software.

Servers: The acquisition of Sun Microsystems has been a financial debacle. The irony is that the rise of Big Data and advanced analytics will create demand for processors such as SPARC that can be optimized to run them. But it may already be too late for Oracle to recover.

Containers: Oracle completely missed the boat when it came to the rise of virtual machines. With the rise of containers as a lighter-weight alternative to virtual machines, Oracle has an opportunity to become a lot more relevant in the world of virtualization. Thus far, the company has failed to seize the initiative.

None of these issues are insurmountable on their own. But collectively, they represent a major challenge that require the attention of a single-minded individual to tackle. In fact, as CTO Ellison just may a chance to write another chapter in Oracle’s already much-storied history.