back to article Oracle: Fight for the right to be third to Amazon's AWS

Mark Hurd reckons Oracle and one “other” will own all the cloud pies in 10 years. Hurd seems to have based this statement on his belief that by 2025, 80 per cent of “production apps” will be on the cloud. Oracle is big on production apps, ergo Oracle will be big on the cloud. Oracle is a member of the old guard and it’s the …

  1. Richard Wharram

    That's not quite how Oracle will gain a foothold

    Not by IaaS or even PaaS or nifty DB offerings in the cloud. That's just playing the same game as Amazon and Microsoft. They won't catch up that way.

    They will gain traction though with their huge array of applications. They can carry on winning huge RFPs with large enterprises and get them hosted in their cloud. From there, with such a large investment already in Oracle's cloud, putting other stuff alongside it starts to make sense.

    1. Steve K

      Re: That's not quite how Oracle will gain a foothold

      They will also gain a foothold because for at least some of their SaaS offerings (e.g. Planning & Budgeting Cloud, Financial Reporting Cloud) you sign up to a 3-year deal - so for at least 3 years you are theirs.

      I'm not sure that would meet all of the usual definitions of a "Cloud" service....

    2. TheVogon

      Re: That's not quite how Oracle will gain a foothold

      "Gartner’s take on the cloud is that AWS is number one, while Microsoft's now closing in as a strong number two."

      Presumably in terms of mind share or something? We have now had 2 consecutive quarters results that both show that Microsoft is well ahead of Amazon in cloud revenue and that the gap is growing.

      1. EddieD

        Re: That's not quite how Oracle will gain a foothold

        Depends what the metric is - Microsoft may be ahead in revenue, but given Amazon's ruthless price cutting strategy, they're going to be ahead in numbers - customers/VMs/apps/whatever...

    3. Vic

      Re: That's not quite how Oracle will gain a foothold

      They can carry on winning huge RFPs with large enterprises and get them hosted in their cloud.

      The US Congress seems determined to stop them doing that...

      Vic.

  2. SecretSonOfHG

    It is so easy to make predictions when you're not going to be around by that time

    Unless Hurd & Co. are still in charge by 2025, what are they losing by making these kind of statements? Nothing. Except of course getting someone to believe them and falling into the trap and in the process pleasing Larry's ears.

    Oracle's biggest fear is that people will stop paying "support" fees for in-house licenses and switch to something that can allow them to, gasp, pay only for what they actually use with no long term commitments.

  3. ratfox

    Keeping old customers is easier than convincing them again.

    Oracle has a lot of customers in production apps is that they have few other places to go, and migrating is painful. I'd go as far to say that a lot of customers would want to leave, if only they could.

    If it comes to developing new solutions in the cloud, however, Oracle has no such user base. And I feel that a lot of their customers are weary to tie themselves again to the big O.

    Taking advantage of your monopoly is a dangerous game.

  4. returnofthemus

    Oh Dear, the author should've gone to Specsavers!

    I think you'll find IBM (SoftLayer) in the visionary portion of the May 2015 GMQ for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (http://acom.azurecomcdn.net/80C57D/blogmedia/blogmedia/2015/05/27/MQ-Figure-1_thumb.jpg)

    In addition, you'll find that Synergy Research have them listed as one of the global top four Cloud operators (http://www.businesscloudnews.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/122/files/2015/04/CIS-Q115.jpg)

    Nice to see Oracle lay out a 10-year plan, I presume Larry thinks the market will wait for him to catch up.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Relentless

    Jeez, as an Oracle shop we've been badgered constantly by their sales teams to take up cloud services. They are relentless! I believe that huge bonuses are being chucked about inside the Oracle Cloud divisions to make customers buy into it at any cost, sales peeps being dispatched all over the UK to meet with customers no matter when or where. They've also just opened another datacentre in the UK to ensure UK data is stored on UK soil to avoid and of the fallout over safe harbour.

  6. nilfs2
    Trollface

    Hostage in your house or hostage somewhere else

    Hostage in your house or hostage somewhere else, it doesn't matter, you are still a hostage. That's how Oracle keeps it's customers, by not letting them even think on spending money on something else non-Oracle.

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