Oracle Hurd: (Nearly) All In on the Cloud by October

Expect at least 95 percent of Oracle’s (ORCL) products to be available in the cloud by this October, according to Oracle co-chief executive Mark Hurd.

“We are still investing, very much in our traditional products,” Hurd told Bloomberg in an interview. “But that said, we are moving those products to now be available in the cloud at a really incredible pace,” he said. “We are not protecting, so to speak, anything.”

Oracle’s goal is for 95 percent of its products to be available in the cloud by mid-October when the database vendor holds its annual OpenWorld conference. Right now, some 65 percent of its products, services and applications can be had in the cloud, Hurd said.

Oracle’s restructuring of its sales force three years ago to focus more on cloud services, the investment the company has made in training its sales teams and revamping the compensation package to urge cloud sales all are paying dividends, he said.

“Our sales force is lined up by buyer, by product, by competitor,” said Hurd. “The immersion in the products, the immersion in the functional area they cover, has been significant,” he said.

“In the applications world, we pay on a metric called annual recurring revenue, so it’s different from a licensed product because we’re actually selling more of a service,” Hurd said. “We have really pushed our sales force.”

Even though Oracle is viewed as showing up late to the cloud party, the company has made significant strides in that direction in the last year.

“On our last quarterly conference call, I predicted that in our fiscal year 2016 Oracle would likely sell more SaaS and PaaS new business than Salesforce.com,” Larry Ellison, Oracle executive chairman and chief technology officer (CTO), said on the company’s recent FQ3 earnings call.

“I was way too cautious and conservative,” he said. “Our cloud business is growing a lot faster than even I expected. Our cloud bookings are now growing at over 100% per year, so I’d like to revise my prediction. I now believe that Oracle will sell more new SaaS and PaaS business than Salesforce.com in this current calendar year, 2015,” he said.

“It’s going to be close, but I think we’re going to sell more in the cloud than they do this year. I suspect that might come as a big surprise to a lot of people out there. You won’t have to wait very long to find out who’s going to win this.”