Live from the newly dubbed “Oracle Cloud Plaza,” John Furrier and Jeff Frick, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, initiated the team’s full coverage of Oracle OpenWorld 2015 event.

A cloudy world

Beginning with the statement, “It’s a cloudy world,” Furrier anticipated a great deal of discussion revolving around the cloud. As Frick pointed out, Oracle’s renaming of Howard Street to “The Oracle Cloud Plaza” is indicative of the overall theme for the show to be the cloud and cloud services.

As Furrier put it, “It will be the battle of the heavyweights.” He described Oracle as a big company that is in transformation, with strong management building teams to move the company into developing integrated end-to end systems in a full cloud world.

Competing giants

When covering the cloud you cannot ignore the momentum of Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) as the competitor to beat. Furrier believes this is all about AWS and about the increased competition and adoption the company is seeing in the enterprise business. He is expecting Larry Ellison, Oracle’s executive chairman and chief technology officer, to throw a huge counter punch at AWS by saying that it is not as viable as Oracle.

IBM, Microsoft Azure and Dell/EMC are also competitors in the space, and Furrier believes, “It’s all going to come down to power, execution and management team.” Frick recognized that Google and Microsoft are also competing in this space. “But AWS, from a competitive standpoint, is a completely different animal,” he said.

Poking the bear

While Ellison has established the company’s financial performance in the cloud space, theCUBE team expects Oracle to differentiate its offerings by changing the sales motion and the pricing for the database and on-prem offerings, but they believe the role of the engineered systems is going to be a real asset to the company.

Frick raised the question, “Did Amazon poke the bear?”

Furrier said, “Amazon has clearly poked the bear.” However, he feels Oracle is ready to respond to Amazon’s rivalry in the install base, noting AWS offerings such as free tools to help with migration. “Oracle is in database transition like they have never seen before,” he said, adding that he feels the company is positioned to move ahead in the enterprise market.

What the enterprise wants

The reality is that when the enterprise looks at the cloud and Internet of Things (IoT), they are looking at the hidden costs, cost of ownership and getting it all without disruption. Furrier explained that the enterprise wants turnkey and scalable solutions when it comes to cloud and IoT. The hosts believe that there will be tweaks to some of the company’s pricing models and sales tactics to deliver a counter punch to the competition’s approach, and they expect more information about Oracle’s IoT offerings.

When it comes to where start-ups working with the big players, the hosts agree that there is plenty of opportunity in the customer-proven Oracle ecosystem. Furrier asserted, “Customers don’t want science projects, they want performance.”

Watch the full video interview below, 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