"Every industry is under threat of disruption" from new entrants, new business models, increasing customer expectations and changing employees (especially millennials), Oracle vice-president of PaaS product marketing Ashish Mohindroo said at the company's CloudWorld event in Sydney.

A range of relatively new technologies such as machine learning, blockchain and IoT can be brought to bear, giving existing businesses a way of dealing with these changes, but they need to be used to transform the organisation, he said.

"Things are changing so incredibly quickly", said Oracle senior vice-president and chief information officer Mark Sunday, so it has "never been more challenging to be an IT leader".

The advent of cloud represents "an entirely new book" in the history of IT, where previous changes such as the successive shifts from mainframe to mini to client/server were merely chapters, he suggested.

Oracle is its own biggest SaaS user, Sunday said, often putting products to use before they are finished.

Examples include Oracle Customer Cloud (with 25,000 users), Human Capital Management (the company has already saved $50 million in recruitment agency fees), eCommerce, Planning and Budgeting, and ERP (which went live in January 2018). Supply Chain Management is scheduled to go live next month.

The company does still have some very specialised applications that run on IaaS, including some third-party security products and the Genesys contact centre software, he noted.

But using its own SaaS allows Oracle's internal IT team to spend less time on development and maintenance, allowing more rapid innovation, Sunday observed. 

"Cloud first" is a common mantra, and cloud-based implementations can provide effective shortcuts. But just as legacy data centres tended to house siloed applications, allowing individual departments to make their own decisions about cloud adoption can similarly result in systems that can't easily be connected, Mohindroo suggested.

Oracle Cloud, on the other hand, is complete (spanning IaaS to SaaS), fast (at least as fast as running the same applications in your own data centre), open (able to run non-Oracle software, thus providing choice and flexibility), and secure, he said.

Furthermore, Oracle's autonomous technology — announced at Oracle Open World 2017 and debuting just over a month ago in Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud — provides high levels of uptime (no more than 2.5 minutes of scheduled or unscheduled downtime per month, compared with 20 minutes a month from AWS, according to Mohindroo), better security (thanks to automated patching) and lower cost.

Many other Oracle services will gain autonomous capabilities this year, including Oracle Database, he said.

Oracle has the industry's broadest range of SaaS products, he claimed, and they incorporate a variety of embedded technologies including artificial intelligence.

Cloud@Customer was another aspect of Oracle's cloud offerings highlighted by Mohindroo. This provides SaaS and other services behind the customer's firewall, but is still fully managed by Oracle and priced according to consumption.

However Oracle's ANZ vice-president of applications Steven Hayes told iTWire that the company rarely talks to its local customers about Cloud@Customer. It is just a delivery option, he said, and the conversations are more about today's "little Oracle" – how the traditional expensive, multi-year projects have gone out of the window in favour of picking a focused project and implementing it in an agile way, and then moving on to the next project once it is delivering value.

Disclosure: The writer attended Oracle CloudWorld Sydney as a guest of the company.