MH: We’ll have a pretty strong set of releases in every category. There will be a suite of SaaS announcements across industries. There will be a suite of SaaS announcements across various product categories. We’ll have some new HCM [human capital management] announcements, new ERP announcements. We’ll have a set of infrastructure announcements, probably 10 to 11 pure infrastructure offerings. Along the way we’ll talk about Database 12.2 that we’ll bring to the market.
JG: What are you going to cover in your keynote?
MH: I’m going to talk a little bit about the pressures on CEOs and CIOs. I think we have a lot of people that still wonder whether cloud is a fad, and clearly we have a lot of competitors that hope so. They really pitch private clouds and all of these things. I’ll try very hard to explain why this is going to go.
I’ll do some predictions about what’s going to happen by 2015. I did some last year; I’ll do some more this year. There are some startling numbers. Last year I predicted all of dev/test would move by 2025. I think almost 40 percent of it has moved already. That’s 30 percent of all of IT. I’ll do some predictions. I have a set of customers with me that will talk about what they’re doing in terms of application strategy, dev/test strategy, etc.
JG: So much is written about Oracle’s transition to the cloud. It gets a tremendous amount of coverage. What are the errors or misperceptions about that transition that you would correct?
MH: Forget what anybody thinks or anybody’s perception is, it’s just numbers. When you see numbers like we had in Q3, you see what we did in Q4, and you see what we did in Q1, somebody is deciding to buy a lot of stuff. It’s a lot of business.
Look at what’s happening in ERP and look at what’s happening in HCM. Our growth was over 40 percent quarter on quarter in ERP. Our growth in HCM was 131 percent. Our PaaS growth again, quarter on quarter. This is an amazing opportunity for us because most of what we have in our cloud is new customers. The bulk of our base is just now moving.
I gave the stat last night that this quarter more than 50 percent of our apps that we sold had never been an Oracle applications customer before. Every quarter we’ve been as high as 70 percent. That’s not a current number. That’s been three or four quarters back. Seventy percent of our customers in the quarter that we had closed them had never been an Oracle customer before. The bulk of our ERP customers, the bulk of our HR customers still have not moved. They’re moving. Don’t get me wrong. And, by the way, look at our renewal rates in support. It isn’t changing. Our on-prem customers are stable. Some are moving, and we’re getting a whole bunch of new customers, and I’m not sure that this isn’t the most exciting cloud story out there.