Business information technology spending isn’t really growing, and there’s little prospect for that to change, Oracle Chief Executive Mark Hurd told customers at the database and business software giant’s OpenWorld conference today in San Francisco.

Of course, cloud computing itself may have a role in that lack of growth. Among the many appeals of moving IT operations to the cloud, which involves letting the likes of Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Azure and, yes, even the far-trailing Oracle Cloud handle computing, storage and applications online, is the lower cost.

But the economics of the cloud also is a way to contend with the reality that companies simply want to spend less on IT, while at the same time contending with increasingly critical issues involving huge amounts of data and the need to beef up cybersecurity.

On top of that, Hurd (pictured) said in returning to a theme he has sounded before, Silicon Valley has contributed to IT’s difficult situation by making too many piece parts that it leaves customers to cobble together — with increasingly unsatisfactory results, such as the recent massive Equifax data breach, partly blamed on the company’s inability to patch problems in critical software quickly.

“Tech innovation and customer adoption happening faster than IT can keep up,” he said, given that many companies still depend on 20-year-old systems and apps, requiring 80 percent of their budgets to be spent on maintaining them rather than adding more innovative technologies. “We’ve told customers to put all this complexity together. That complexity has driven to this very difficult environment to maintain and to innovate.”

But he posed cloud computing as a prime answer to how to deal with that complexity, returning it to the suppliers to put together for customers. Naturally, he made a pitch for Oracle’s soup-to-nuts approach, providing a unified system, Exadata, that can be used the same whether it’s from the cloud or on computers in customers’ data centers.

Oracle founder and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison made a similar case Sunday night when he announced the next generation of Oracle’s database, which he said will be able to handle key tasks such as critical software patches automatically. That will be critical in helping stop cybersecurity breaches, he said.

Ultimately, Hurd said, the cloud can provide more security against hackers than any one company can maintain. “You want to fight ‘em, or do you think we should fight ‘em?” he asked.

Photo: Oracle livestream