Oracle's strength in database and middleware is countered by long-term uncertainty in applications and hardware as IT consumption preference shifts from traditional, on-premise solutions to public cloud models. This transition is still in its early stages, but has already proven disruptive to certain legacy IT providers. Oracle has attempted to navigate this changing landscape via acquisitions and other architectural enhancements to its offerings (e.g., Fusion, database level multi-tenancy), but competitors such as salesforce.com and Workday have taken mindshare and market share. Oracle?s dominance in database, high-margin maintenance streams and ample resources to acquire should keep it competing for a long time, but it is difficult to know whether Oracle will end up on the winning or losing side of cloud computing.
