Talking to many internal SaaS and (non ODB) PaaS teams, none of them seam to know why they're performing as poorly as they are. Especially with regards to attracting new customers to existing products or new products to existing customers.
My gut feeling says there's something larger happening at Oracle. There's a sense of dispair and hopelessness in leadership that's even worse than when I started 5 years ago. The total lack of central purpose and direction of the company, means its drive and intent is atomised to first line management, who are mostly clueless about the content of our propositions.
They hired process managers, perhaps capable of running a stable database monopoly, for all products, most of which were not as dominant in their market. In stead they should have hired disruptors and intrapreneurs that would find a way to combine the broad set of acquired technologies with the robust brand of a global powerhouse.
Much the same as MSFT and ADBE have successfully been doing. But there, it took at least a new CEO and senior leadership team; which may be why Oracle feels more lost than those companies did before their turnaround.
You can still find the right type of people with the product teams though, especially when it involves a recent acquisition. The CTO's of an acquired company are usually better at conceiving of a new GTM within Oracle. The fact that a lot of them are leaving, and that old school Oracle database guys are left running product leadership, means that the CEO/CTO is perhaps our biggest problem.
Oracle looks to me mostly as an investment vehicle of its owner. An owner that used to be brilliant in acquisition strategy but seems absent and unavailable to strategy discussions now. In some places, it looks like an internal hedgefund is doing ruthless asset stripping.
Oracle is great as a box of technology components, for people that either wish to work on developing those, or are happy to build their own narratives around those, for their existing customers. But there's almost no room for any other role and it doesn't provide a basis for a global entity. It's much more efficient to do massive LBO's around the good products and let these define their own GTM again.