Live Blog: Oracle Presidents Mark Hurd, Safra Catz Address Partners

Oracle (ORCL) Presidents Safra Catz and Mark Hurd are addressing partners at OpenWorld 2013. Here’s what the duo told OPN Specialized partners about cloud, mobile, social, Big Data and Engineered Systems opportunities. 

The chatter includes…

Recap: Oracle President Mark Hurd

• 9 billion devices linked to the Internet today, almost all driven by humans making connections. “That’s about to change.”
• “There will be a rise of data we’ve never seen. Will it be 10x or 20x data next few years? Whatever it’s going to be, it’s going to be big.”
• “The average age of a legacy application is roughly 17 years. Translation: Upgrade and next-generation opportunities are here.”
• “Most customers growing data 30-40 perecent per year.”
• “Four big banks in the US. Each has more than 100 petabytes. One has more than 300 petabytes. What if they grow data 40 percent? Let’s go conservative at 100 petabytes. At $7,000 per terabyes, that’s $700 million to house the data. We’re not going to do that. We’ll get more efficient.”
• “We’ve defied gravity in Europe. We invested and grew when others shrank.” Hurd also mentioned big investments in Latin America (Brazil and Mexico) and other areas of Europe plus Asia this year.
• “At the top of the company: We are very partner friendly. We need help. We want to be in more deals. We want more partners to help us penetrate markets. If I can get partners who can go all the way up the ecosystem — to engineered systems — that’s just a different level. We’re also saying resell our cloud — PaaS, IaaS. The only thing I wouldn’t do as a partner is build and operate your own cloud. We’ll compensate you to support our cloud.”

Recap: Andy Bailey, senior VP, strategic alliances

• Oracle now has 25,000 channel partners
• There are now 150 Oracle specializations for partners
• 5,000 specialized partners
• On cloud, Oracle has 200 specialized partners; 2,200 certified implementation specialists, and 30,000 sales and pre-sales specialists.
• Oracle Cloud Partner Program: 130 percent quarter over quarter deal registration growth and more than 75 percent approved.

Recap: Partner Honorees

• Oracle spent considerable time announcing partners of the year in various categories worldwide. The VAR Guy will follow up later this week with a closer look at the winners.

Recap: John Fowler, executive VP, systems

• The typical processor costs $100 million to design and develop. Oracle is delivering three this year.
• HP, Cisco, NetApp and others can’t engineer systems all the way through, he asserted. IBM is the closest to Oracle on that vision but IBM lacks the software component, Fowler asserted.

Recap: Oracle President and CFO Safra Catz

• She joined Oracle in 1999 for a four-year tour of duty. Nearly 15 years later, she’s still on board.
• “If you’re around Larry Ellison long enough is you realize he sees into the future. And if you stick around you see the future become the present.”
• Ellison saw utility computing with end-users having always-connected, simple, low-cost devices, she asserted. “Now we’re calling it cloud.”
• Scalability, performance, open standards and security remain Oracle’s focus areas, she asserted. “We are the biggest data; we pull tother the most information.”
• Catz made the pitch for Oracle’s in-memory strategy. CEO Larry Ellison is expected to demonstrate the technology later today. 
• “Our share of the market goes up every year,” said Catz. “Thanks to partners like you.”
• “When you outlive relational rivals like Informix you get bigger rivals like IBM and Microsoft. But we’re moving ahead of them, too. We’re spending $5 billion a year building [through R&D] this infrastructure [i.e., Engineered Systems]. We have all the tools for all the pieces to work together. I look to you to help share it with our customers.”
• Catz thanked partners for working with Oracle amid the market alternatives. 

Additional details coming soon.