Oracle’s Ellison says cloud industry still in early days

Oracle Corp. Executive Chairman Larry Ellison said his company will continue its push into the cloud while noting the industry still has much room to grow.
Leadership in the field remains up for grabs with the biggest cloud-only businesses still relatively small — none at around $100 billion, Ellison said, probably referring to annual sales. Redwood City’s Oracle now counts relatively newer entrants such as Amazon.com, Workday Inc. and Microsoft Corp. among its most formidable competitors, the company’s billionaire founder said on Sunday.
“This is how much our world has changed,” Ellison said during a keynote at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. “We no longer pay any attention” to traditional competitors SAP SE and IBM Corp. “It is quite a shock.”
Oracle is investing in the cloud as the company comes under growing pressure from rivals that deliver software via connections over the Internet. It is now rolling out products that touch many different parts of its lineup, including applications and tools for customers in e-commerce and manufacturing.
While this shift helps the company break into new markets, it’s also hampering Oracle’s traditional business of selling licenses for software installed on corporate systems.

“We are in the middle — and I really do mean in the middle — of a general shift in computing that is no less important than shift onto personal computing,” he said. “It seems like early days.”
In recent years, Oracle had battled Salesforce.com in the cloud and raced to beat SAP and IBM. Oracle has been redesigning its products so that they can be sold and delivered over the Internet to keep up with the transformation in the broader enterprise technology industry, where companies are increasing spending on cloud services from providers such as Amazon, Workday and Microsoft.
Revenue however has come under pressure during the company’s transition. In the period that ended Aug. 31, sales fell 1.7 percent to $8.45 billion. Analysts on average had forecast sales of $8.53 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

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Amazon 3Q results up on strong sales, cloud computing growth

NEW YORK — Amazon is primed for success as the busy holiday season approaches.

The e-commerce powerhouse reported a surprise third-quarter profit, driven by a boost in revenue from its Prime Day promotion and continued strong growth in its cloud-computing offerings.

Results beat expectations, and shares jumped 10 percent in aftermarket trading.

Amazon’s strategy has long been to invest the money it makes back into its businesses, particularly by expanding offerings in its $99-a-year Prime loyalty program and its cloud-computing business, called Amazon Web Services. But in recent quarters, it has shown an ability to turn a profit, too.

Revenue jumped 23 percent during the quarter, helped by strong sales of electronics and general merchandise, a good sign for the Seattle retailer ahead of the crucial holiday months of November and December, when retailers make a substantial percentage of their annual sales.

Prime Day, Amazon’s 20th-anniversary sale in July, boosted revenue by 2 percentage points, the company said. Amazon did not break out sales figures. The company also said that more people signed up for a free trial of Prime on that day than any other day ever. And it said people converted to the paid program at the same rate they do on major shopping days such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the busy shopping days after Thanksgiving.

“Prime growth is fueling Amazon (in) getting a bigger share of the household budget,” said Cowen analyst John Blackledge. He estimates there are about 38 million Prime members in the U.S.

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