Oracle challenges it will beat Salesforce at Cloud CRM

Oracle set its sights on overtaking Salesforce as the No. 1 cloud provider of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) services.

“We’re No. 2 in cloud CX (customer experience). Our primary competitor of course is Salesforce, but we’re going to catch up. We’re going to pass them,” said Edward Screven, Chief Corporate Architect at Oracle, during the vendor’s Oracle Cloud Day digital event.

Oracle’s Customer Experience (CX) Cloud is the vendor’s suite of tools for CRM. Oracle is already the cloud market leader in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) with 25,000 customers, and it’s next closest competitor, Workday, has a few hundred customers, according to Screven. The vendor is also the market leader in cloud-based human resources (HR), he adds, or what Oracle refers to as “human capital management.”

The cloud market continues to be dominated by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM, according to the latest data from Synergy Research Group. Oracle Boasts Benefits on Gen 2 Cloud

Oracle maintains that because its second-generation cloud is autonomous and adheres to complete isolation, it has mostly taken human beings out of the equation. Other clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) are complex, require significant resources, and thus errors are inevitable, says Screven.

Oracle also announced that it recently won over a customer, Naveego that previously used AWS.

“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has proven to be 60% more cost effective on compute, and they were able to take out the overhead cost of data transfer and Kubernetes-based container services,” said Katie Horvath, CEO at Naveego, in a statement.

Oracle continues to bolster efforts to take on AWS and Microsoft Azure, including a plan to hire 2,000 employees that was announced in October 2019. However, last year the company shed thousands of employees during two rounds of layoffs, and multiple executives have left the company as it struggles to shift its focus to cloud computing.

The company also, earlier this year, expanded its Gen 2 Cloud into five new regions, bringing its total cloud region count to 21. Oracle posted its strongest growth in nearly two years in March when it reported its fiscal third quarter of 2020 earnings.