via Forbes:
When Oracle rolled out its Autonomous Database earlier this year, Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison thought the biggest selling point would be that it eliminates the cost of human labor to patch, tune, upgrade, and secure the database. Another big selling point was that it eliminates human errors, since all of that work happens automatically.
Those advantages have proved to be highly valuable to customers. But the biggest selling point for Oracle’s Autonomous Database, Ellison said, has been the speed of deployment and the boon to productivity, since companies can get their developers to work on new ideas so much faster.
“We’ve had customers that literally got their databases up and running in 15 minutes…whereas the normal time to put something like that up was 15 days,” Ellison said on Oracle’s second-quarter earnings call on December 17. “The fact that the existing teams of [database administrators], our primary customers, can make themselves dramatically more productive, get 10 times more done in the same time period than they could prior to the Autonomous Database, has been the thing that has been most shocking to our customers.”
Ellison re-emphasized on the call that two strategic initiatives would determine Oracle’s success: the cloud-based Oracle Autonomous Database and its two cloud-based enterprise resource planning suites, comprising financial, procurement, production planning, and other core applications.
Oracle has nearly 6,000 customers of its Oracle ERP Cloud suite and more than 16,000 of its Oracle NetSuite cloud suite. Oracle’s been adding about 1,000 cloud ERP customers a quarter, Ellison said, thanks to its technology leadership. CEO Mark Hurd said those two cloud ERP businesses delivered a combined revenue growth rate of 34% in the second quarter. With Oracle’s Autonomous Database, which brings new “self-driving” capabilities to the market-leading Oracle Database, Oracle has “the largest technology lead we have ever enjoyed over our database competitors since we entered the database market almost four decades ago,” Ellison said.