When it comes to enterprise applications, there is a growing trend toward providing applications in the cloud.  The financial community loves this, because a software vendor’s revenue stream becomes much more predictable.  But there are advantages for users as well.

At the Oracle Value Chain Summit on Tuesday, January 27, Mark Hurd, the CEO of Oracle, made some bold predictions about applications hosted in the “Cloud.”  He said that Cloud applications will account for 50 to 60 percent of the total enterprise application market within 5 to 6 years because of advantages related to speed of development of new functionality, easier implementations and much, much easier upgrades.

Steve Miranda, the Executive VP of Development at Oracle, said that because of these advantages, “It is not a question of ‘if,’ it is a question of ‘when,’ all new applications (from all enterprise vendors) will be delivered in the Cloud.”

The Oracle Value Chain Summit, as the name would suggest, was focused on supply chain applications.  There were over 2,500 attendees this year.

Miranda made the point that to fully leverage all the advantages inherent in the Cloud, applications need to be rebuilt from scratch rather than just hosting existing applications.  In particular, the Oracle applications were rebuilt to: first of all, support frequent updates, through the use of more metadata; and secondly, to reduce the need for customization by building out Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities that allow extensions to the SaaS-based Cloud applications to be built and thus allow for protected upgrades.

SOURCE: forbes.com