Oracle president Mark Hurd says new account teams with single-contact accountability are improving customer satisfaction, but he has no kind words for SAP.

Oracle president Mark Hurd threw verbal rose petals on the feet of consumers during his keynote talk on the InformationWeek Conference on Tuesday, while giving competitors SAP and Rimini Street the thorns.

Hurd hit on Oracle’s cloud and engineered systems strengths, as is typical in his public appearances, but he also broke new ground in keeping with questions from InformationWeek editor-in-chief Rob Preston at the difficulty Oracle customers have in facing only one person, as a result of company’s 80-plus acquisitions during the last six years.

“The client-facing piece is the most important issue that we’ve had, but we believe that the folks who represent Oracle should know their products,” Hurd said. “After I got to the corporate three or four years ago, we did not have single accountability for accounts, but we’ve installed nearly 300 [account directors] from almost nil three years ago.”

[For more about this year’s top IT organizations, read InformationWeek Elite 100: Winning Digital Strategies.]

This new role is a part of a team featuring the account director, an architect, an executive sponsor (who reports to Hurd or a degree below him), and a support director.

“Where we’ve put these teams in place, our customer satisfaction is terribly high — typically 10 points higher and prior to industry-average customer satisfaction. We’re attempting to roll that model out as quickly as we are able to, but we need to find the proper talent.”

Progress was “70, 80, 90 accounts per year,” Hurd said, and he noted that roughly 43% of it’s purchased by the highest 200 customers, 48% by the highest 500 customers, and 53% by the pinnacle 2,000 customers, “so that you can get the rhythm of where we’re headed.”

As for changing what InformationWeek’s Preston described as Oracle’s “tough, sales-oriented culture,” Hurd pushed back slightly, saying he’s looking to prepared the ground toward a “kinder, gentler” Oracle. “i believe that all these characterizations of our reputation are broad generalizations,” he said. But in preference to just being about being nice to do business with, Hurd added, “I’m more excited about customers getting the fitting of everything that Oracle can offer. We will be able to assist you to get a better price, we will assist you to innovate, and we wish to bring all of our capabilities to the table. The difficulty that’s first handy for us now could be to get our people able where we will assist you strategically.”

Competitors get thorns
Asked about various competitive threats, Hurd talked up Oracle’s multi-tenant and coming in-memory capabilities in Oracle Database 12c, and he disparaged the prospective impact of SAP customers switching to that vendor’s Hana in-memory platform. “As a percent of our overall database business, a really tiny percent of it’s going to sit below an SAP ERP,” Hurd said, adding an estimate of “below 5%.”

That figure sounds surprisingly low, provided that SAP has hundreds and hundreds of shoppers, with some 60% estimated to be using Oracle database.

Hurd turned the tables on SAP, questioning its technique of going after the database business, since enterprise applications — SAP’s core business — are moving toward cloud computing. “The chance for us to become the leading applications company on the earth is predicated at the proven fact that we’ve become the leader within the cloud. If i used to be the opposite company, I’d be very concentrated on getting my applications to the cloud. When you don’t, strategically in future years it would be tough times.”

Citing Oracle’s own six-year journey to create Oracle Fusion applications for cloud delivery, Hurd said, “It’s 2020 [before SAP can rewrite its core applications for cloud delivery]. That’s where the battle is headed, rather than a battle inside the stack and competing with us within the database business.”

Hurd neglected to say SAP’s cloud-based edge apps and its acquisitions, like SuccessFactors, Ariba, and Hybris. There’s also SAP’s process of hosting current Business Suite applications for patrons with managed services. But it’s true that there is no SAP-equivalent, next-generation app suite comparable to Oracle Fusion Applications.

In another shot at a competitor, Hurd bristled at a matter about third-party support providers and Oracle financial stats that show it added $932 million in software license update and support revenues in 2013 while spending approximately $50 million less in operating expenses on that category, year over year.

Questioning the power of third-party vendors to give software patches, Hurd said, “There are complaints in this without delay,” alluding to the suit Oracle has pending against Rimini Street. “In the event you pay Oracle for support, it covers subscription and support, so that you get the appropriate to future versions of the software as a part of that. You would need to include our R&D number, in addition to have a look at the price of support, to get an integrated view of that ecosystem.”

Hurd closed his comments by commiserating with CIOs. “i do know there is a lot of pressure on you, and being CIO is the toughest job on the earth,” he said. “It’s essential to have one foot within the business world and one foot inside the technology world. Whether it comes off soft or nice, it’s more important that we come let you with ideas, and that is the reason a task we need to get well at everyday.”

IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP are fighting to become your in-memory technology provider. Do you actually need the velocity? Get the digital In-Memory Databases issue of InformationWeek today.

Doug Henschen is Executive Editor of InformationWeek, where he covers the intersection of enterprise applications with information management, business intelligence, big data and analytics. He previously served as editor in chief of Intelligent Enterprise, editor in chief of … View Full Bio

More Insights