Building out a Cloud offering that is truly elastic and global is really, really expensive given the need for datacenters around the world and the requirement for secure, low latency connections between them. With this in mind, look at the market cap of major Cloud (or enterprise software) corporations
Amazon - $475B
Microsoft - $563B
Google - $663B
Oracle - $207B
SAP - $132B
IBM - $134B
Salesforce - $65B
Workday - $21B
Just looking at things from this perspective...
-
While Oracle can offer its own IaaS/PaaS platform to customers since these are already in place as part of building out their SaaS offerings, it isn't well positioned to invest the necessary capital to catch-up and compete against the top three IaaS/PaaS providers. It is likely that, at best, Oracle will be a Tier 2 Cloud provider.
-
Despite struggling to compete at the highest level, Oracle does have significant cash reserves and a global customer base. It will need to invest in datacenters around the world just to meet existing demands and that will position it to, potentially, jump in on the next wave of computing (whatever that may be).
-
IBM, Oracle and SAP are in the middle ground and are all struggling. They have a legacy heritage that isn't well suited for the new approaches of Cloud, were sizable competitors in the past, still tend to focus heavily on keeping customers tied to on-premises solutions and are having difficulty in making the transition to Cloud. Seemingly, their best play right now is to find ways to hold on to the customer base they have in order to survive and find a growth market to jump into. In Oracle's case, see the next point...
-
Where Oracle has a chance to win/grow is in SaaS as the battle is against smaller corporations like Salesforce and Workday. It is also already an area where Oracle has strength and, with the acquisition of Netsuite, has the ability to address an even wider portion of the market. Being able to expand the overall solution (e.g. integration, database, etc.) along with offering pre-integrations with Oracle's IaaS/PaaS solutions could provide a powerful differentiation along with a way to reduce cost (to the customer and/or for Oracle's bottom line).
Looking at the overall market this way is just one angle to consider as you evaluate the security/opportunity of your current position at Oracle or where you may want to go if Oracle's direction and your career path don't align.