The cloud looms large for the future, said Mark Hurd, Oracle CEO, in his Monday morning keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2015.
Organizations are getting squeezed, he explained. They have old infrastructure; there is the need for innovation but also great pressure to do things such as increase security and adhere to governance mandates which are not innovative; and also pressure to keep costs flat, without increasing IT expenses. “This is why the cloud is such a big deal,” said Hurd.
“It is not about OpEx and CapEx. It is about a lower cost structure. It is about a less complex environment. It is about a more secure, reliable environment with rapid innovation,” he said. “That is driving this; nothing else. It is macroeconomics - the ability to get from here to there at a lower cost and get to faster innovation now.”
Against this backdrop of conflicting challenges facing organizations, Hurd proceeded to lay out his list of top 5 predictions for 2025.
Mark Hurd’s Top Predictions for 2025:
- By 2025, 80% of all production apps will be in the cloud
- By 2025, two suite providers will have 80% of the SaaS apps market because shared, extensible schemas across suites reduce the cost and complexity of integration
- 100% of Dev/Test will be in the cloud by 2025, said Hurd, noting that right now, 30% of all IT is Dev/Test and it is one of the least governed and managed areas in IT.
- By 2025, all enterprise data will be stored in the cloud: More data is already stored in clouds than in traditional storage system; tens of billions of IoT devices will generated massive amounts of new enterprise data using modern cloud based applications; and public storage capacity will be sourced by storage providers directly from component manufacturers not existing storage vendors.
- By 2025 enterprise clouds will be the most secure IT environments, said Hurd, noting that Oracle uses full security IP to run its cloud, full encryption by default, and implements the latest patches across the entire infrastructure. In contrast, he said, 74% of organizations take more than 3 months to implement a patch, and 99.9% of 2014 exploits had a patch available to prevent it for more than 1 year.
After he shared his list, Hurd continued in a late night talk show format while seated at a desk, alternately doing interviews and pausing for video clips with customers including Jim Fowler, CIO of GE; Mark Dennen CFO of Solairus Aviation; Mike Brady, CTO of AIG; Fari Ebrahimi, senior vice president and CIO of Avaya; and Mike Dinsdale, chief growth officer of DocuSign.
Fowler explained why cloud is important to his company, stating that GE has a philosophy that it will build what differentiates the company in the marketplace, but buy innovation for things that do not differentiate GE, and do that acquisition in the cloud. The goal with buying innovation he said is to free up time and dollars to put back into the things that differentiate GE to its customers.
While Oracle believes that the current on-premise operating model is unsustainable, Hurd noted in closing that it also believes a dual, hybrid on-premise/cloud environment will continue and that 10 years from now, on-premise will still be here. That is why, he said, Oracle’s approach of having the same solutions and capabilities in the cloud and on-premise is important with the ability to move data and applications between the two.
What is being introduced at OpenWorld 2015 is the conclusion of what Oracle has been talking about for the last 4 or 5 years, said Hurd: “Moving our entire software environment to the cloud. We now have virtually 100% of our portfolio rewritten, rebuilt and modernized for the cloud while we simultaneously have invested in our on-prem environment.”