Oracle is innovating fast to move its rank amongst the world’s top five cloud provider companies. Steve Daheb, who was appointed Cloud Chief at Oracle in 2015 is geared up to steer the growth of key Oracle Cloud portfolio including PaaS and IaaS.
Interestingly, he has been the CMO at Citrix, Blue Coat and Emulex in his career. With a track record of building businesses, creating new categories, and driving integrated sales and marketing to achieve revenue growth, this CMO – turned – Cloud Chief is determined to achieve top-line growth for Oracle's cloud business.
IDG had a fascinating conversation with Steve Daheb, senior vice president, Oracle Cloud at the company’s corporate headquarters in San Francisco, USA.
Edited excerpts:
Are we in a cloud-first world, and what were the major changes in 2018 with respect to companies’ cloud-first strategy, not only for startups but legacy ones too?
The customers are stepping back and evaluating everything in their IT infra holistically with respect to applications and packaged applications versus custom applications. They might look at it from an app development, a data management, an analytics, a security or from an infrastructure perspective.
As we engage across multiple layers of cloud - SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, we can have a thoughtful discussion with them because some things might be ready to move to cloud right away. And there are other things, be it type of data or the type of custom app, say to run a transportation system. Maybe that doesn't move soon or maybe there's data sovereignty or compliance or regulatory issues. Cloud first, according to me, means that people will evaluate and decide what things they can move to cloud.
Everyone hasn’t moved everything to the cloud.Cloud first doesn't mean you drop everything but take inventory of everything - like let’s move marketing to cloud, but for an ERP app, I'm not going to do that anytime soon. And the fun thing for us is that we can have those discussions. So it winds up being a cloud only, not just a cloud first.
The digital businesses largely powered by say app or ERP on mobile suggests cloud adoption is accelerating though in bits and pieces across the industry (Brownfields and Greenfields) and not the entire infrastructure per se?
Yes, that’s the trend in the marketplace across the globe depending on maturity of geography and verticals. There are various ways to enrich what exists in cloud, say, add mobile capability. How can companies use integration for multiple disparate applications, think about analytics really being an app or mobile app or an ERP on the mobile the game-changing and how does cloud enable it? They might not change the underlying application, but atleast they get a different flavor or maybe integrate some chatbot digital assistance into it, which cloud allows you to do.
But, from an existing application in a brownfield, you have the ability to integrate, connect, and extend its capabilities. And then of course you have the net new Greenfield as well.
Another thriving trend is multi-cloud which isn’t easy as it sounds, because of integration, skillsets, interoperability.
There is a lot of the integration from our perspective from where we came, the heterogeneous multi-vendor datacenter world. It's not simple but it’s interesting to watch, because we're solving (in cloud) the same complexities that exist on-prem - like have Google cloud, AWS, Azure for some Apps and then Oracle workloads for other. There might be Tableau running and then Salesforce is running something else.
Cloud was supposed to be easy. A part will be multi-cloud to a certain extent and people might starting seeing complexity. Cloud 1.0 was ‘lift and shift’. But now, it's more on how to architect, migrate, manage, secure, explore analytics, add new functionality to an existing app, maybe in brownfield or create net new cloud native ones. And hence multi-cloud lines have been part of that discussion.
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