Oracle Touts Cloud Growth As Ellison Says SAP ‘Entirely Missed The Boat’ On ERP

‘SAP is more responsible for our leadership position than we are,’ Ellison says. The company saw its services and license support revenues grow 5 percent year over year to $7.3 billion.

Saying rival SAP “had entirely missed the boat” on the ERP market, Oracle Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison spent much of the company’s earnings call Wednesday promoting Oracle’s success in poaching customers from SAP.

On the call, Ellison spent more than 10 minutes reading from a list of enterprise resource planning (ERP) customers he alleges Oracle won over from SAP. Some of the companies, including Western Digital and security company G4S, have moved entire operations to Oracle’s Fusion ERP suite, Ellison said on the call.

Other companies, including car manufacturer Honda and delivery company DHL, have adopted some Oracle tools, not yet moving over to the full Fusion ERP suite. But Ellison sees them as future Oracle wins. “The vast majority of these companies that started this journey will finish this journey,” he said.

SAP declined to comment on Ellison’s remarks. However, in a January quarterly earnings call, SAP CEO Christian Klein said, “In the ERP space alone, we have more than 200 wins against Oracle,” according to a call transcript.

In the third fiscal quarter, ended Feb. 28, Oracle signed contracts “totaling hundreds of millions of dollars” to migrate large users from SAP’s ERP product offerings to Oracle Fusion ERP. In one example, Oracle beat SAP and Infor for a contract with Denver Public Schools to replace an Infor Lawson system.

As Ellison sees it, the wins come from the Austin, Texas-based tech giant rewriting its ERP products for the cloud. SAP, he said, has “entirely missed the boat.”

“SAP is more responsible for our leadership position than we are,” Ellison said.

Other highlights from the call include Ellison hyping growth in the company’s database business starting in the next fiscal year. Fueling part of that growth is Autonomous Database, which Ellison called not just a cost saver but a technological benefit for avoiding human errors and human security threats.

CRN named Oracle Autonomous Database among its 2020 Products of the Year.

“We expect it to really explode,” he said.

For the quarter ending Feb. 28, Oracle saw revenue from its Gen2 Cloud Infrastructure business, which includes Autonomous Database, more than doubled. Fusion Cloud ERP revenue grew 30 percent in the third fiscal quarter. NetSuite Cloud ERP revenue grew 24 percent.

In Oracle’s previous earnings call, the company reported Oracle’s Fusion ERP grew 33 percent year-over-year to more than 7,500 customers, while NetSuite grew 21 percent to more than 24,000 customers.

Total quarterly revenues grew 3 percent year over year to $10.1 billion.

Cloud services and license support revenues grew 5 percent year over year to $7.3 billion. This business unit accounts for 72 percent of Oracle’s revenue.

Cloud license and on-premises license revenues grew 4 percent to $1.3 billion. This business unit accounts for 13 percent of Oracle’s revenues.

In January, SAP launched a new collection of services and software, offered as a single subscription product called “Rise with SAP,” designed to assist customers with cloud migration and digital transformation initiatives.

Oracle stock sank 5 percent in after-hours trading Wednesday to $68.30.