Business Insider/Julie Bort
Oracle CEO Safra Catz talking to reporters at a press conference in April, 2015
The thing that goads her (and Larry Ellison) is that SAP is still No. 1 in the business applications market with Oracle at No. 2, she admitted during a press conference at the company on Thursday.
"This is how we feel: silver medal is the first loser. No one goes home and tells their husband, 'Look at this. I won a silver.' Bronze, those guys are going, 'Thank god I made it on the podium.' The Silver is going, 'If I only tried a little harder,'" she said.
She recounted how Oracle originally duked it out in the database market.
"In the database business, where we used to be No. 2, 3, fighting it out with the Informixes and Sybases of the world. We beat those guys, and they helped us frankly. They beat themselves," she said. Informix was eventually bought by IBM, and Sybase by SAP.
And after that, "We got bigger, much scarier competitors. We ended up with Microsoft, a company with all the money in the world, the way I look at those guys. And IBM, another company that, historically, dwarfed us," she said.
We got bigger, much scarier competitors. We ended up with Microsoft, a company with all the money in the world ... and IBM, another company that, historically, dwarfed us.
She believes a similar thing is finally happening in the application market.
Before Oracle bought PeopleSoft, "SAP was five or six times our size in the applications business."
Today, Oracle holds top market share in various segments of the app market, like middleware, (the software used to build and host other apps), she said.
"But the truth is, we are still No. 2 to them [SAP] in applications. They are bigger in the applications business than we are, even when you subtract out the fact that they actually resell Oracle database," she says.
And she's convinced that with the rise of the cloud, Oracle is finally ready to overtake them.
"Just like in database, No. 1 is helping us. It's a truly shocking situation," she says.
"Instead of focusing on building their applications for the cloud. They decided to come on our field in the database market. I'm truly shocked by this," she says.
"Instead of focusing on building their applications for the cloud. They decided to come on our field in the database market. I'm truly shocked by this," she says.
She's referred to SAP's super-fast database called HANA. The company has banked its future on this product and insists it's selling very well.
In the meantime, Oracle has spent a decade and billions of dollars building its cloud, between acquisitions and re-writing its own apps.
"It took us a decade to get here. Maybe it won't take [SAP] a decade. By then it won't matter, because we are surrounding them with cloud applications," she said.
Time will tell if Oracle prevails. But this much is obviously true: "We are NOT good No. 2," Catz said. "Being No. 2, we're not going to sit by."