“The applications market is about $125 billion per year,” says Oracle CEO Mark Hurd. “That is spent primarily on applications and most of it today is spent on on-premise applications. That market changes pretty significantly as it moves to cloud. As it moves to cloud, the subscription that you pay for the cloud includes not only the application but includes all of the hardware, the servers, and storage. It becomes a bigger market just by the very nature of the migration of the application to SAAS.”

Recently, Hurd noted that all of their current customers will eventually move to the cloud. “We have a big existing on-premise user base and I believe all of them will move to the cloud,” said Oracle CEO Mark Hurd. “In fact, I was with a large group of our users just last night and they’re all going to move on their time frame. When we get to a certain point you will start to see a geometric move in the market and it will be significant.”

Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle, discusses their NetSuite acquisition and the growing size of the applications market as it moves to the cloud in an interview on Fox Business. Hurd was in Las Vegas for the Oracle NetSuite SuiteWorld event:

NetSuite Acquisition Has Been an Amazing Success

We’ve invested a lot in the applications market. We’ve invested in big and small segments of the market. Big customers and small customers. We acquired NetSuite about two and a half years ago it’s really been an amazing success. There are roughly 10,000 customers here (in Las Vegas) for our event (Oracle NetSuite SuiteWorld). It is very exciting.

When we bought NetSuite the company was growing about 16 percent in revenue. We’ve invested a lot in R&D and in tailoring the application for more industries. We’ve added sales people as well. It has resulted in incredible growth. Starting about a year ago we began to really grow our booking and that’s now translated to revenue. Last quarter we reported revenue that was almost double the revenue growth we had coming into the acquisition.

Applications Market Changes Significantly As It Moves to Cloud

There is a couple of phenomena going on at the same time. The applications market is about $125 billion per year. That is spent primarily on applications and most of it today is spent on on-premise applications. That market changes pretty significantly as it moves to cloud. As it moves to cloud, the subscription that you pay for the cloud includes not only the application but includes all of the hardware, the servers, and storage. It becomes a bigger market just by the very nature of the migration of the application to SAAS.

Inside that $125 billion about $75 billion is back office. That would be described as things like general ledger, accounting, supply chain, procurement, and HR. The other 30 percent is front office including things like sales automation and marketing automation. NetSuite has played in the mid-market, small customer side of that back office market. It’s had explosive growth. When you ask who’s moving (to the cloud), it’s really everybody from the biggest guys, whether those be as big as an AT&T all the way to your smaller startup.

If you look today, half of the cloud application customers (and revenue) that we have came from our base and half came from outside.