Oracle today set its sights on overtaking Salesforce as the No. 1 cloud provider of customer relationship management (CRM) services. 

“We’re No. 2 in cloud CX (customer experience). Our primary competitor of course is Salesforce, but we’re going to catch up. We’re going to pass them,” Edward Screven, chief corporate architect at Oracle, said during the vendor’s Oracle Cloud Day digital event. Oracle’s Customer Experience (CX) Cloud is the vendor’s suite of tools for CRM.

Oracle is already the cloud market leader in enterprise resource planning (ERP) with 25,000 customers, and it’s next closest competitor, Workday, has a few hundred customers, according to Screven. The vendor is also the market leader in cloud-based human resources (HR), he adds, or what Oracle refers to as “human capital management.” 

Much of that poise, including the goal to beat Salesforce at its own game, relies on the success of Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud, a bare metal framework that it started building in 2016 and released in 2018. The technology behind that effort seems solid — it has landed some big customers as a result — but Oracle’s share of the cloud market is just 2% and it hasn’t budged in at least two years. 

The cloud market continues to be dominated by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM, according to the latest data from Synergy Research Group. 

Oracle maintains that because its second-generation cloud is autonomous and adheres to complete isolation, it has mostly taken human beings out of the equation. Other clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) are complex, require significant resources, and thus errors are inevitable, says Screven. 

“Every single compute node in our Gen 2 Cloud is attached to something we call a parameter control computer,” he said. “Nothing goes into the compute node unless it passes through the perimeter control computer,” which creates a private network for each customer.

“The only connection between a compute node and that perimeter control computer is a network,” Screven said. “They don’t share memory. They don’t even share a bus. They only share a network connection. And what that means is that code, any code running in that compute node, cannot get to any other part of the Oracle Gen 2 Cloud, unless it’s through network traffic through that perimeter control computer.”

Oracle today also announced that it recently won over a customer, Naveego, that previously used AWS. The cloud data vendor migrated from AWS to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in 30 days and has already realized a 60% decrease in costs. “Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has proven to be 60% more cost effective on compute, and they were able to take out the overhead cost of data transfer and Kubernetes-based container services,” said Katie Horvath, CEO at Naveego, in a statement.

Oracle continues to bolster efforts to take on AWS and Microsoft Azure, including a plan to hire 2,000 employees that was announced in October 2019. However, last year the company shed thousands of employees during two rounds of layoffs, and multiple executives have left the company as it struggles to shift its focus to cloud computing. 

The company also, earlier this year, expanded its Gen 2 Cloud into five new regions, bringing its total cloud region count to 21. Oracle posted its strongest growth in nearly two years in March when it reported its fiscal third quarter of 2020 earnings.