Oracle Plans Cloud Push to Take On Salesforce, Workday

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Aaron Ricadela.

Oracle Corp. (ORCL) plans to unveil the first new version of its flagship database program in five years and an expanded line of high-end servers, as the software maker steps up its effort to win more cloud-computing business.

At its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Sept. 30, Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison will show the new 12c database, designed for cloud computing, and more powerful systems to handle ballooning amounts of corporate data more efficiently, Mark Hurd, co-president at Oracle, said in an interview yesterday…

Oracle has doubled sales (ORCL) in the past five years and boosted annual profit (ORCL) by gobbling up business-software companies to challenge SAP AG (SAP) while also selling customers its database, which accounted for about 48 percent of sales in the latest fiscal year. At OpenWorld, Oracle will seek to show there’s an alternative path to cloud computing — where programs are stored and managed remotely — than the no-hardware approach espoused by rivals such as Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM) and Workday Inc. (WDAY)

“This will be an important week for them coming up, to declare they’re in the cloud,” said Rick Sherlund, an analyst at Nomura Holdings Inc., who recommends buying Oracle shares. “Larry’s getting with the program in a big way.”…

Read more from the source @ http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-09-28/oracle-plans-cloud-push-to-take-on-salesforce-workday