Enterprises looking to migrate to cloud and enter the Digital Age can sometimes assume that the newest vendors on the block are best suited to job. Eyeballs naturally gravitate to the shiniest, most-hyped businesses that are not only cloud experts, but perhaps cloud-native themselves. But are there some key advantages to hiring an old hand, even in the realm of bleeding-edge technology? Some say absolutely there are, namely the valuable network of relationships older companies have acquired over the years.

Matt Eastwood, senior VP at IDC, sat in as a guest analyst on theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during Oracle OpenWorld 2016. He spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohosts of theCUBE, about Oracle’s position in the cloud market today, as well as how Oracle is beefing up a horizontal-vertical axis that could give it an industry-specific cloud edge.

“Oracle’s bet the last few years was really doubling down on applications that increasingly were verticalized, so now you have this kind of verticalized orientation on top of that database layer that they’ve been so strong in,” Eastwood said. “And now you’re trying to drive a conversation in the industry that is increasingly about industry cloud — cloud that’s really optimized for healthcare or financial services or for transportation and logistics — you name it,” he said.

Strength in numbers

Burris argued that Oracle’s relationships with partners give it a head-start to fleshing out the industry clouds that enterprises are hungry for.

“Oracle’s not gong to build all those industry clouds; the channel is going to build all those industry clouds. So Oracle has first given a pathway to channel partners that have been loyal to them for 30 or 35 years, and once they give that channel a pathway, the channel’s going to start bringing a lot of momentum, a lot of customers with them,” he said.

The new sticky

Furrier chimed in to say that customers may find workload-targeted solutions highly attractive — enough so to make Oracle competitive with best-of-breed cloud players.

“The workload’s the new sticky. In the old days, [Oracle’s] database had WebLogic [server] — that became a nice stickiness for Oracle,” he said. He argued that if this is so, and workload-targeting depends on a robust channel network, then,”Is it really a channel war, not a cloud war?”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Oracle OpenWorld.

(* Disclosure: Oracle and other companies sponsor some OpenWorld segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Oracle nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE