Oracle's Ellison Vows "Most Comprehensive Cloud On Earth"

CWmike writes "Oracle CEO Larry Ellison declared the company is ready to offer 'the most comprehensive cloud on the planet Earth,' during a webcast event on Wednesday. 'It's been a long time coming,' Ellison said of the Oracle Public Cloud, which encompasses Oracle's suite of Fusion Applications delivered as both SaaS (software as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service) features, including the Java Cloud Service and Database Cloud Service. It's also the home of Oracle Social Network, the company's foray into Facebook-like collaboration tools for enterprises. Wednesday's event — and Twitter (where his first tweet is a gem) — also provided Ellison with an opportunity to tout what he called Oracle Public Cloud's many advantages over rivals such as SAP and Salesforce.com, as well as to engage in some of his traditional competitive trash talk."

SAP bought Ariba

[aslanuk]

This is pure headlines because SAP announced they are to acquire Ariba for $4.7bln a few weeks back. Ariba is the #1 SaaS procurement software vendor from sourcing through to payment. I beleive what made Ariba so valuable (10x revenue) was their network of businesses. I would not class myself as an expert but it appears that if you want to source, procure or invoice then you connect your business to your trading partners over this network - it was described as the Facebook for business. A quick guess would be this removes paper from the process, means everything's electronic, reduces cost and other PHB's wet dreams. Reading around it looks like Ariba was kicking Oracle and SAP's booty in this space and their network was growing at a huge rate. There is a lot of opinion on SAP's acquisition of Ariba but if Larry hasn't got this network part then it's Oracle On Demand by another name. I guess SAP think this network is the key, looked at google+ and realised that to build it themselves once an established player is in play is difficult.