Rob Preston, editorial director in Oracle’s Content Central organization, wrote an article in Forbes about Oracle CEO Mark Hurd’s recent keynote at Oracle Modern Business Experience in Las Vegas.

CEO Mark Hurd emphasized that Cloud computing isn’t so much a technology as it is a new business model. Cloud is a critical part of helping companies achieve priorities like increasing revenue, boosting cash flow, decreasing spending, and managing risk. This is why it has stuck around over the course of the last 10 years—because it’s more than just a technology; it’s a business model.

“At its core, it simply drives down capital expenditures, reduces labor, creates certainty of outcomes, and reduces the cost of overall maintenance. In the end it costs less. And while it does all that, it’s actually more reliable, more secure. And it gives you access to more innovation.”

            —Mark Hurd, Oracle CEO

Mark Hurd explained that at the root of that business model shift is the ability to free up money and people to innovate by helping create new and different digitally-driven products, services and customer experiences within flat IT budgets. This ability becomes particularly important in the current slow-growth economic environment, in which most companies must grab market to increase revenues.

In today’s workforce, the average CEO only lasts in his or her job for roughly four years, and 40 percent last only 18 to 20 months. This means that the average CEO only has a short time frame to develop their top business priorities to focus on (increasing revenue, boosting cash flow, decreasing spending, and managing risk) before their boards start pressuring them. There is a lot of pressure to produce short-term results, and there is virtually no patience for lack of execution.

Instead of hiring additional experts to assemble, support, and deploy emerging technologies, companies can instead subscribe to Cloud application services that come with those advanced technologies and the latest capabilities that come with them. Hurd explains that following this Cloud business model accelerates the speed of innovation and bottom-line results.

For more information about how Cloud represents a business model shift and CEO Mark Hurd’s take, check out the full Forbes article attached below.