In last week’s article Is IBM Watson A ‘Joke’?, I quoted Social Capital CEO and founder Chamath Palihapitiya bad-mouthing Big Blue on the May 8th edition of Closing Bell on CNBC.
Palihapitiya’s didn’t heap his scorn solely on IBM, however. Oracle was also in his gun sights. “Oracle…is not a business that is going to win tomorrow,” Palihapitiya told CNBC. “It has an unbelievable sales and marketing machinery that will figure out how to tax its existing customers in umpteen numbers of Byzantine ways.”
We may argue over Oracle’s future prospects, but its current ones are quite rosy, as the enterprise software behemoth is coming off of a fabulous quarter. “Total cloud revenues in the quarter were $1.4 billion, up 66% from last year,” crowed Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz on the company’s June 18, 2017 earnings call (from Seeking Alpha). “Total on-premise software revenues were $7.5 billion essentially unchanged from last year and while new software license revenues were $2.6 billion, down 4% reflecting the increasing preference of customers for cloud.”
Taxing customers in Byzantine ways or no, Oracle must be doing something right to make such numbers. Why, then, is Palihapitiya so bearish on its long-term prospects?
Let’s take a closer look.
Read the entire article at https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/07/11/oracles-cloud-strategy-ruthless-or-byzantine/.
Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Oracle PR.
