Oracle OpenWorld 2015: Ellison Disses IBM, SAP as ‘Nowhere in the Cloud’

Oracle CTO Larry Ellison kicked off Oracle OpenWorld 2015 in true Ellison style—with both guns blazing, pointing squarely at Oracle’s biggest competitors in the cloud space.

“Our two biggest competitors in last two decades have been IBM and SAP and we no longer pay any attention to either one,” Ellison said during his keynote event Oct. 25. “It’s quite a shock. SAP is nowhere in cloud, and only Oracle and Microsoft is in every level of the cloud—applications, platform and infrastructure.”

Rather, he said, Amazon Web Services today is Oracle’s biggest competitor. “We compete with Amazon in cloud infrastructure and never, ever see IBM—this is how much our world has changed.”

Indeed, Oracle is dead-set on being the all-powerful cloud ruler (which is interesting when you think about how Ellison once considered cloud computing a fad), and plans to announce a slew of new offerings and services to help it in its quest both during the event and over the next few months.

Already, the company announced vertical cloud applications for e-commerce and manufacturing, which Ellison noted were stepping stones as Oracle “fills out its footprint” in the cloud.

Ellison may be talking a good game in the cloud, but judging from its latest earnings numbers—which include a cloud revenue miss for its first quarter—Oracle’s got some ground to cover. Its software and cloud revenues for the quarter declined 2 percent year over year to $6.5 billion, and cloud revenues totaled $611 million, below analysts’ expectations of $630 million.

Still, Oracle in August said it’s going “all-in” on cloud, with CEO Mark Hurd proclaiming at least 95 percent of Oracle’s products would be available in the cloud by this month.

Whether the company can pull such an ambitious feat is yet to be seen (there’s less than a week until November).

Also during the opening keynote, Hurd and Intel CEO Brian Krzanich took to the stage to debut a new program dubbed “Exa Your Power,” designed to draw IBM Power systems users to Oracle Engineered Systems powered by Intel. The program offers to qualified customers:

“We are committed to ensuring that Oracle runs faster with Intel,” Krzanich said.