Dive Brief:

• Oracle is rolling out a series of enhancements to its cloud applications suite, updating products for supply chain, customer experience, ERP and human capital management cloud products, the company announced Wednesday.  

• The company is focused on making its products useful for companies of all sizes, not just focusing on the enterprise for sales. But, by making application suites available in the cloud, Oracle products can appeal to SMBs, according to Liam Nolan, VP of cloud applications development at Oracle, who spoke with ZDNet in an interview.

• Using SaaS and PaaS offerings, Nolan said people are adopting Oracle services at a greater rate, configuring and building their own solutions on top of Oracle offerings, ZDNet reports.

Dive Insight:

Oracle was one of the latecomers to the cloud era, and is now working to compete in a rapidly maturing market. The company has had to boost its cloud infrastructure offerings at the same time it developed its software suite for the cloud era.

Oracle's NetSuite acquisition was a big help in maturing the company's software suite, which was completed in November for $9.3 billion. NetSuite is one of the original cloud software companies, which helped boost Oracle's product portfolio and market share practically overnight.

Now Oracle has to convince business customers that its software is what they need, competing against software rivals like Salesforce, Workday and SAP. Oracle's SaaS may be the expansion it needed after its NetSuite acquisition as its now in the cloud IaaS and SaaS domain, taking on the likes of AWS and Microsoft.