Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle, delivered his “Vision 2025: Digital Transformation in the Cloud” keynote on day two of Oracle OpenWorld 2015.

The state of the industry

He began with the state of the industry, providing an overview of how most corporate CEOs are thinking today. Growing the business, increasing performance and offering short-term gratification on a quarterly basis seem to weight heavy on today’s CEO. Coupling this with the economy — between 2008 and 2015, there has only been a one percent revenue growth — there is only one solution: Cut costs.

Hurd pointed to the decline his competition has seen, most notably IBM being down 108 percent, and punctuated it with a seven percent growth for Oracle. It is clear to most industry insiders that the IT expense is down while legacy systems age. Hurd stated that the current on-premises systems on average are 20 years old. Installed before the dawn of Internet, search, mobile, social media and cloud, these systems need upgrading, and the driver for any IT expense is security and compliance.

Paradigm shift

Hurd envisions a decade-long transition to the cloud motivated by millennials changing the way business works. He said, “The demographic shift is causing a technology shift.”

The future for Oracle is building best-in-breed applications that run on all three layers of the cloud and on-prem. He revealed that Oracle is already ahead of the curve with its latest offering and claims that the company is ready for the next decade.

Predictions

• Prediction 1: By 2020, 80 percent of production apps will be in the cloud.
  Hurd cited that public cloud SaaS makes up 24 percent of the applications market today and that 85 percent of all new applications built on architecture today for SaaS.
• Prediction 2: By 2025, two suite providers will have 80 percent of the SaaS apps market.
  Hurd commented, “There will be two suite providers in the cloud; I volunteer us to be one.” He aded, “One hundred percent of Oracle’s portfolio has been rewritten and rebuilt for the cloud.”
• Prediction 3: 100 percent of Dev/Test will be in the cloud by 2025.
  The days of testing on servers and databases are over, according to Hurd. About 20 percent is already there today, and by 2025 he asserted that 100 percent will reside in the cloud.
• Predication 4: All enterprise data will be stored in clouds.
  Consider that enterprise is storing more consumer data in the cloud than company data on-prem. Add in that tens of billions of IoT devices will generate massive amounts of new enterprise data using modern cloud-based applications. And imagine public cloud storage capabilities being sourced by service providers directly from component manufactures instead of storage vendors, and Hurd makes a pretty good case that the cloud will be the only viable option.
• Prediction 5: By 2025, enterprise clouds will be the most secure IT environments.
  Hurd has no qualms about saying that Oracle is already there. With the company’s out-of-box solutions and Engineered Systems, the data security switch is always on because it resides on the silicon and the key to the data sits with the customer. Additionally, as security levels increase and compliance needs change, the system will tell you and offer you solutions.

Ironically, Hurd’s predictions fall right in line with Oracle’s business roadmap, and he feels that enterprise can move with technology and keep costs low by using the company’s systems.

Customer testimonials

During the keynote, Hurd brought in some customers to back him up.

First on stage, Jim Fowler, chief information officer for General Electric Co. (GE), who described GE as going back to being a core industrial company. He explained how the company is using a cloud strategy to drive productivity. His philosophy as a CIO is: “Buy the technologies that will not differentiate the company. Build the technology that will differentiate us from the competition.”

After a video presentation that included various clients examining the benefits of being an Oracle customer, Mike Brady, chief technology officer for American International Group, Inc. (AIG), took a seat with Hurd to discuss his battle with legacy migration. He told Hurd, “We need the ability to build infrastructure and integrate it at the server level.” The insurance giant is also using analytics capabilities and drones (yes the things that fly above us) to improve efficiency.

Stay tuned for the full video keynote, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Oracle OpenWorld 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE