掌门人亲解甲骨文的云战略

    你们如何将这种策略传达给客户？

    人们一听到“云”这个词就会不由自主产生这样一种观点，即所有东西都应放到云中。我们在结构上做了一些小小的改动。客户说“我非常想要这个”的时候，我们已经开发出解决方案，客户可以将它作为一款来自甲骨文云的在线应用。而如果他们重视知识产权，不希望将内容放到云中，他们也可以将其存放到防火墙后面。我们传达的信息是：不要担心交付架构，多关心关心应用和知识产权吧。

你的销售团队销售这种策略的效果如何？你满意吗？

    并非所有的事情都会让人振奋，不过总体来说，销售部门的进展还是让我感到高兴。我认为，在一年半以前，我们让他们有了一点改变，他们取得了不错的进展。

我交流过的一位分析师指出，销售队伍的发展速度要快于许可收益增长。为什么？

    我们把合理比例的销售力量增长投入到云销售中。而在出售云的时候，其实是在出售一种订阅服务，而不是在出售许可。（软件服务订阅用户支付的速度通常慢于许可客户——而且支付的金额可能也会更少。）但这并不意味着，这种商业模式的长远前景不佳，但在建立订阅收益基础的过程中，确实会出现生产力损耗。

甲骨文在成为硬件制造商方面有什么策略？你始终对今天的策略100%满意吗？

    其实我们一直在坚持，就是为了最终完成这个目标。我们的策略是垂直整合硬件和软件，我们会将硬件和软件放在一起思考，一起进行设计，以提供更好的成果。我们认为，这种策略已经给许多项目带来了更好的结果，我会尽量说明这些项目。

    首先，我们所做的是客户之前的工作。过去，大家会（从供应商）购买一台服务器，从（另外一名供应商处）买操作系统，从（第三名供应商处）购买数据库，再从（其他供应商处）购买中间件，然后把这些东西交给IT部门，IT部门将所有这些东西整合在一起。而我们的想法是，为什么我们不能提前为客户将所有这些东西整合起来？我们会对它进行测试。我们会提供保修。我们来做这项工作，而成本将被计入我们的研发成本，而不是客户的IT预算。这是第一点：工作由我们完成。第二，这种组合的性能更好，意味着我们建造硬件来优化软件的效果。第三，客户会获得不同的支持体验。我们将所有东西整合起来，现在就有一个版本。我们会测试软件的所有版本，而且我们已经发现了所有问题。因此，我们可以建立一个资源库，只要客户遇到问题，我们便可以直接与客户对接，在极短的时间内自动解决问题。所以，我们的策略能够改变游戏规则——而且说实话，现在有许多人在试图模仿我们的策略。许多竞争对手都在这样做。

    How do you communicate this strategy to customers?

    When you hear "cloud" and you gravitate to a perspective that everything should be cloud. We've tried to do something a little bit different architecturally. When the customer says, "I really want this," we've built our solution so they can either use it as an online application from the Oracle cloud, or if they like the IP and don't want it in the cloud, they can do it behind their firewall. Our message: Instead of worrying about the delivery architecture, worry about the application. Worry about the IP.

How happy are you with how well your sales force is selling this strategy?

    You're never going to ever say you're thrilled with everything. But I am happy with the progress of our sales organization. I think we changed them quite a bit a year and a half ago, and I think they've made good progress.

One analyst I spoke to pointed out that sales force growth is growing faster than license revenue growth. Why?

    We have invested a reasonable percentage of our sales force growth into this thing called cloud. And when you sell cloud, you sell a subscription. You do not sell a license. [Subscribers to software services typically pay more slowly than license customers -- and perhaps less as well.] That doesn't mean long run that the business models aren't fine, but you do have this outage of productivity as you build up the subscription revenue base.

What was Oracle's strategy in becoming a hardware maker, and are you 100% stay-the-course satisfied with that strategy today?

    Well, we're staying the course, just to take that off the table. Our strategy has been to vertically integrate hardware and software, in that we think hardware and software together, engineered together, provides a better outcome. And we think it provides a better outcome on several planes, and I'll try to describe what they are.

    First, we do the work that you, the customer, used to do. So historically in the industry you could buy a server from [one vendor]. You could buy an operating system from [another]. You could buy a database from [a third]. You could buy a middleware from [yet another]. And then you give it to your IT organization, and your IT organization glues all this stuff together. Well, our better idea would be, Why don't we just glue it all together for you? We'll test it. We'll warrant it. And we'll do that work, and that cost goes into our R&D as opposed to your IT budget. So point one: We do the work, you don't. Second, this stuff just performs better, meaning that we build hardware to optimize the performance of the software. Third, you get a different support experience. So the fact that we build the stuff together and integrate it together, we now have one version. We have tested all the versions of software together, and we've seen all the problems. And we can create a repository, and any time our customer has a problem, we directly hook up and can auto-patch it in nanoseconds. So our strategy has been to sort of change the game with this -- and then you see a lot of people trying to frankly, you know, imitate that strategy. You've seen it from many of our competitors.