Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff took part in a forty five-minute conference call on Thursday to discuss the nine-year strategic partnership announced this week. The stated purpose was to offer the click and monetary analysts an opportunity to invite questions, however the two executives spent a lot time lavishing compliments on one another and emphasizing the comparatively simple act of integrating cloud apps that they left little time for questions. What’s more, a few of the questions that were asked weren’t adequately answered.
It’s been a monumental week of strategic partnerships for Oracle, starting with the cloud partnership with Microsoft announced on Monday, the Salesforce.com partnership announced on Tuesday and the NetSuite deal unveiled late Wednesday. Oracle President Mark Hurd fielded questions for the red team in the course of the joint press calls with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and NetSuite CEO Zack Nelson, respectively. Benioff, the previous Oracle employee who often cites Ellison as certainly one of his mentors, was given an audience together with his former boss.
The 2 executives started by revisiting the fundamentals in their nine-year partnership. Salesforce.com will standardize on Oracle Linux, Oracle Database, Oracle Java Middleware and Oracle Exadata; Oracle will integrate Fusion HCM, the Oracle Financial Cloud and other applications with Salesforce.com for rapid implementation and interoperability. Then it was directly to the glowing remarks.
Benioff: i would like thank Larry, because Oracle is usually there for us whenever we’d like them, and they’re a real partner.
Ellison: Virtually anytime we buy an organization they’re running Salesforce.com CRM.
Benioff: There isn’t any better product on the planet within the database area than Oracle.
Ellison: We see Salesforce.com everywhere in the market. They’re the market leader, and our customers expect us to work gracefully with Salesforce.com.
Benioff: After such a lot of decades of leading Oracle, Larry’s leadership has really ensured that Oracle is the correct database product on this planet.
Chances are you’ll boil the script all the way down to three key messages: Oracle is a good database vendor that offers us secure, reliable, cost-effective and high-performance infrastructure; Salesforce is the leading cloud company and the CRM leader; We’ll find how to work better together so customers can integrate our products quickly, save time and cash and get well performance.
Largely off the script in this week’s conference calls was the question of where these partnerships leave Oracle’s strategy. You’re left with the impression that it’s abdicating cloud platform leadership to Microsoft Azure, cloud CRM leadership to Salesforce.com and cloud ERP leadership to NetSuite.
How does this make Fusion applications more appealing, Ellison was asked?
“We’ve quite a few customers that use Oracle applications. It is a graceful upgrade from our current on-premises ERP applications to Fusion ERP within the cloud and Fusion HCM within the cloud,” he began, but then he returned to the “we will work better together” script.
“We do not want every a type of customers to ought to hire a 3rd-party or to ought to spend some huge cash to wire up a Salesforce application with Oracle applications,” he said. “That makes Fusion applications much easier to adopt.”
Not less than it is a frank admission that Salesforce and NetSuite are much bigger within the cloud than is Fusion, so they’re in a neater position than Oracle itself to tug along sales of Fusion HCM and Fusion Financials. But when you are a current or potential buyer of Fusion CRM or Fusion ERP, Oracle’s endorsements and prepared-made integrations with Salesforce and NetSuite must leave you wondering if they’re really within the game.