Hurd reveals Oracle's four-pronged strategy

Mark Hurd has used his keynote at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco today to outline the four main pillars of Oracle's strategy.

"First, we want everything to be best of breed at every level of the technollogy stack. We want to be leader in market share at every level," he said.

"Second, we want to vertically integrate those pieces into differentiated solutions to provide superior TCO [total cost of ownership].

"Third is Fusion cloud applications, a new generation of applications. They are modular, and can run on-premise or in the cloud.

"And fourth, is to deliver this technology to any industry, to solve customer's problems at the highest order of business issue. We want to help customers become more efficient and save money as we help them innovate."

Hurd also revealed that he believes that CIOs currently have the hardest jobs in the business, stating that his customers simultaneously have an innovation agenda and an austerity agenda. This can make the CIO's role extremely difficult.

"If I ever think my job's tough I think of the CIO. At eight in the morning you meet with your CEO, who says: 'I want to innovate, how can you help me connect and engage with my customers?' Then four hours later, that same CIO is in a meeting with the CFO who says: 'There's no money. We're cutting budget by five per cent'."

He added that the CIO's job is further complicated by the problem of data growing 35-40 per cent per year, which Hurd said was the typical growth he sees from Oracle customers.

"You have to spend money to house that data. You have to be as efficient as you can whilst attacking the changes. We believe Oracle is the only company on the planet capable of attacking both the innovation and the austerity agendas simultaneously," he concluded.