Since Oracle really got serious about the cloud back in 2018, its ‘Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud Platform’ has evolved in a number of ways without forestalling AWS’s ascent in the database management space.
So, that made Oracle Cloud World 2024 a great occasion to declare victory and shake hands with AWS, as the company had earlier done with Azure SQL maker Microsoft and Google Cloud.
Oracle’s reported cloud advances made it one of the brighter lights on the stock market this year, but the company still faces the challenge to boost capex spending in order to go toe-to-toe with big cloud players. The biggies are feverishly building out bigger cloud data centers as Generative AI workloads grow. Oracle is re-defining a cloud region to include some smaller cloud setups.
This latest handshake includes the launch of Oracle Database@AWS, a new offering that “allows customers to access Oracle Autonomous Database on dedicated infrastructure and Oracle Exadata Database Service within AWS.” Workloads running on Oracle RAC are also covered.
The announcement eases migration headaches, Brian Tilzer, Chief Digital, Analytics and Technology Officer, Best Buy, said in a statement.
“This announcement makes it easier for us to move some of our database workloads to AWS,” concurred Joe Frazier, Head of Architecture and Platform Engineering, Fidelity Investments.
That means the Oracle database’s tight connection to Oracle infrastructure will be supported in all three of the big clouds. And it may save some capex on its own multiyear cloud data center rollout.
“What if we embedded an Oracle data center right into an AWS data center?” asked Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison at the event in Las Vegas. He outlined benefits to users in terms of workload migration, system integration, low-latency and simple billing.
That’s not the tenor of question Ellison asked in past Oracle annual conferences, where he sometimes harshly lectured on alleged shortcomings of AWS offerings. This reporter has written before that Oracle’s pride often borders on arrogation. But a 2022 confab saw some lessening of the “Born to Raise Hell” tattooed version of Larry Ellison.
Ellison’s manner was further subdued this year, sitting with new AWS CEO Matt Garman. He was downright cordial.
Ellison told Garman that one of his biggest customers, Jaime Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, asked when the Oracle database was going to run on AWS each time they met. With the AWS deal, Ellison can scratch that item on the to-do list.
The bottom line: Oracle’s customers want multicloud support and Oracle better help by making these kind of deals. Multicloud means options, but options still seem to center on three big cloud providers. Oracle’s data prowess alone will not solve this. Will its efforts to move customers to its own cloud be due for reduced attention?
Now that this new rendition of Oracle cloud strategy is accomplished, maybe it is time to rename the yearly Oracle Conference Oracle AI World. Unsurprisingly, that was a very major push, both in Oracle’s quarterly report, and at its showcase conference this year. – J. Vaughan PG
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Shown above: Crowd awaiting Ellison keynote.