Oracle, which was late to cloud, nonetheless has arrived in time for mission-critical apps to make the cloud leap, according to the company’s new top cloud exec Shawn Price. An SAP veteran, Price joined Oracle in October just weeks after the company announced its latest-and-greatest cloud wares.

It takes a lot of work to move serious business apps like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) from on-premises servers to a cloud deployment model. In ERP, “the cloud approach of many [vendors] has not evolved the code to be cloud-based. They put a new UI on it, re-batch it and move it to managed services,” Price told a group of reporters after an OracleWorld customer event in Boston on Tuesday.

Heavy lifting: Moving ERP to cloud

In Price’s view, Oracle, has successfully navigated that transition. But he also seems to know the company has some convincing to do. Oracle, in “all humility,” wants customers to try its cloud, Price said, and rolled its “customer 2 cloud” program to help existing Oracle accounts make the move. “Humility” and “Oracle” are not two words you expect to see in the same sentence, but that is what the cloud revolution has done to legacy enterprise software companies.

SOURCE: gigaom.com