Mark Hurd was interviewed by NetSuite's executive vice-president, Evan Goldberg toward the end of the opening keynote at SuiteWorld in Las Vegas.
Mark Hurd: Ever since we acquired NetSuite, I remember writing part of the press release, saying these products would go on forever… I remember writing that… and I still get the question, 'are you eventually going to quit building this product?' And so communicating with clarity, 'this is our direction, this is our strategy' not just externally, but also internally, I think is a big part of that.
Evan Goldberg: Speaking of NetSuite, we're part of a bigger strategy that Oracle has, maybe you can talk about how you see NetSuite fitting in.
Mark Hurd: I think it [NetSuite] is as strategic an acquisition as we have ever made. And I think you [Evan Goldberg] and the team have performed extremely well to make it look like as good a decision as I hoped it would look like.
Evan Goldberg: So how does NetSuite fit into the overall Oracle strategy, which is [a] very broad, dramatic strategy, for the coming years?
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Mark Hurd: As you know, there's two big bets in the company - 'applications' and 'database' and the applications market is a $125B market as its constituted today, so it's a big market, lot of money in it. And frankly, we think all of that is going to move to the cloud. All of it. Just for simplicity's sake, it costs less, it's more secure, there's more innovation; we could go on for a long time about it. But there's really no reason why all of the applications don't move to the cloud.
The first generation of ERPs that were deployed down in the marketplace were pretty-much led by SAP and Oracle. But SAP and Oracle didn't have 50% of the market share, believe it or not. It's often talked about like one had 45 and the other had 42 and hardly anyone else participated.
That's not what happened. SAP had 24-25%, we had 21-22%, that means 53% of the market is in the hands of quote-unquote 'others' and nobody of those others has more than 3%. So the back-office is, of the $125B, about $75B of it. So the bulk of it is in the back office.
We built a product at Oracle called Fusion, which is really built for the most complex companies in the world. But frankly not built, discretely, for the purpose that NetSuite was. And I actually believe, contrary to many, that the two were extremely complimentary.
Whether it was NetSuite in a small division of a big company, whether it was NetSuite being the complete back-end for a mid-sized company; these were perfect fits. And the fact that we sit here as the only company with a true SaaS back-office suite… and we actually have two of them… and nobody else has one of them is a big differentiator for us and we're just going to continue to invest in both.
The author attended SuiteWorld as a guest of NetSuite