Oracle hiring 5,000 to compete on cloud

The workforce boost is a threat to Salesforce’s dominance in market

REDWOOD CITY >> In the battle between Oracle and Salesforce for cloud software supremacy, Oracle is about to add 5,000 new soldiers to its army.

On Monday, Oracle said it will hire 5,000 new professionals to work on its cloud-based products and services. According to Oracle, these hires will include “new engineers, consultants, sales and support people” for what the company says is “already the world’s fastest growing multi-billion-dollar cloud business.”

Redwood City-based Oracle has made cloud-based services one of its top priorities in recent years. It has expanded into cloud-based software, platform and infrastructure in order to meet challenges from cloud-based software pioneer Salesforce, and other companies such as IBM.

When Oracle reported its fourth-quarter results in June, it said sales from cloud offerings rose 58 percent from a year ago, to $1.4 billion. For its entire fiscal year, Oracle’s cloud business reported $4.6 billion in sales, an increase of 60 percent from the prior year.

In a statement, Oracle said the new hires will be in addition to the 2,650 cloud sales professionals and 1,500 cloud developers it has already hired in the U.S. this year.

However, an Oracle spokeswoman wouldn’t say if any of the 5,000 new hires would be based in the Bay Area.

Oracle also wouldn’t say if its new hiring binge was in response

to any of the recent waves made by cloud-computing giant Salesforce.

Oracle and Salesforce are big rivals in the cloudbased software business. Salesforce Chief Executive Marc Benioff used to work for Oracle. And Oracle co-founder, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Chairman Larry Ellison doesn’t like it when a rival, especially one of his former employees, claims a piece of his turf.

Ellison has never been shy about calling out Salesforce, either. When Oracle delivered its fourth-quarter report two months ago, Ellison got on a conference call to let Benioff & Co. know he is still coming after them.

“We sold more than $2 billion in cloud recurring revenue,” Ellison said. “We’re on our way to surpassing Salesforce in the SaaS (software as a service) market.”

But just last week, Salesforce reported strong quarterly results, including earnings and sales that topped Wall Street analysts’ forecasts. Benioff also said the company is on the way to bringing in $10 billion in cloud-based revenue this year, a figure that Oracle is also trying to reach.

With its announcement of 5,000 new cloud-business hires, Oracle may have also been trying to take some attention away from Salesforce, which literally reached into the clouds with the recent completion of its nearly 1,100-foot-high Salesforce Tower in San Francisco. The tower stands over every other building in the area, including the Oracle Arena across the Bay in Oakland.