- Oracle has set a clear strategy to take on AWS and turn the game to its advantage.
- California-based company may be late into the party but it came with an advantage as they had the time and took the time to learn the game well.
- By next year, Oracle will have more data centres than AWS
- Compared to AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Alibaba Cloud, Gartner states that Oracle is the provider whose scores improved the most in 2020.
Bengaluru: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google are stealing the limelight in the public-cloud infrastructure space and the market talks about them a lot.
AWS still rules the roost but Microsoft and Google are closing the gaps but one player which is slowly and steadily climbing up the ladder is Oracle, without getting much attention.
It’s worth noting that while OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) is architected and optimised for hosting Oracle’s applications, such as ERP suites and databases, Oracle has been successful in winning workloads using non-Oracle technologies.
Heads of industry professionals turned when Oracle won the video conferencing company Zoom’s contract in April.
The contract even got the attention of AWS as Zoom still uses AWS’ pubic cloud infrastructure.
After Zoom contract, Oracle has kept on adding big clients such as 8X8, McAfee, 7-Eleven, GE, Sky, Outfront, CERN, Cisco and Nissan.
The California-based company may be late into the cloud infrastructure party but it came with an advantage as they had the time and took the time to learn the game well.
Oracle reported a 140% jump in its Gen2 public cloud revenue in its fourth-quarter results that ended on May 31, albeit from a small base. But 140% is a big leap and it is going to grow further.
To grow faster and match its rivals, Oracle has invested considerably in cloud-based services over the last few years and its CTO and Chairman Larry Eliison, all on his own, reclassified his Autonomous Database baby as part of Oracle’s OCI business.
Autonomous Database was part of the PaaS offering but now, it is part of IaaS offering.
Oracle’s scores improve further
Oracle is a big player in SaaS with its broadest and deepest sets of apps, right from the beginning, but to turn the game to its advantage, it started bundling every cloud asset it offers into a single package and started offering it in a version running inside a customer’s data centre, known as Dedicated Region Cloud at Customer, and behind a firewall.
Oracle now provides more than 50 services while AWS and Microsoft Azure Stack offer only limited services to customer premises.
Oracle, clearly, knows that to win the IaaS war with AWS it has to have more data centres and Ellison has set its sights on the number game.
Oracle has 26 cloud regions around the world as of August and it is expected to have 36 Gen 2 public cloud regions around the world versus AWS’s 27. A cloud region has two data centres.
According to a Gartner’s recent report, it said that Oracle has demonstrated impressive improvements in both the IaaS and PaaS capabilities of OCI in the past year.
Between 2019 and 2020, Gartner stated that OCI improved from a solution score of 38 out of 100, to 62 out of 100. Its score on the required criteria vital to businesses improved from 45% to 74%.
Compared to AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Alibaba Cloud, Oracle is the provider whose scores improved the most in 2020.
However, enterprises may still find it necessary to remediate or accept missing required capabilities, as OCI’s scores remain notably lower than the market leader, AWS, which has a solution score of 93.
Hare and the tortoise race
Consequently, Gartner now recommends that cloud architects consider OCI not only for cloud environments that are anchored by workloads that use Oracle technologies but also for use cases centred on bare-metal servers, high-performance computing needs or high-performance networking needs.
The research firm believes that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, by 2025, will at least double its cloud infrastructure platform services market share from the current three per cent.
Many organisations continue to view Oracle solely as a software company, but OCI is a public cloud solution optimised by design to run Oracle technologies, with capabilities now broad enough to run general-purpose workloads.
Big players beware, even though Oracle is moving at a snail’s pace, it is right behind you.
The classic example is the race between the fast but often-distracted hare and a slow but relentless tortoise.
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