Larry Ellison used to focus the power of his 136,000-strong Oracle army into skirmishes with competing business software companies, such as SAP, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Workday and Salesforce.
Now the Oracle co-founder and CTO has graduated to gunning for Amazon Web Services and is cocksure that his company will eventually snatch significant market share from the Seattle-based cloud services king.
No matter that AWS owns three times more market share (31 percent) than second-place Microsoft Azure (9 percent) in the race to sell cloud services. Never mind that after IBM (7 percent) and Google (4 percent), everybody else—including Oracle—claims only minuscule portions of the market and may need years to make significant traction.
Nonetheless, Ellison proclaimed at his opening keynote Sept. 18 that Oracle is going to give Amazon a lot more competition in the future, especially when it comes to running high-performance workloads for large IT systems.
Amazon Will Have ‘Serous Competition’ Going Forward
“Amazon’s lead is over. They are going to have serious competition going forward,” Ellison proclaimed to several thousand attendees at Oracle OpenWorld at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. “We’re going to out-perform them with the most powerful and efficient software and hardware on the planet. This is our key focus in 2017 and beyond.”
Ellison’s strategy now is to start building specialized cloud-app data centers to house Oracle’s engineered systems and cloudware. He said the company’s upcoming group of data centers will provide faster workload computing results so that it can speed right by AWS, Azure, IBM and Google Cloud.
These new-generation data centers, Ellison said, will show customers in the aerospace industry, financial services, the federal government, the oil and gas exploration business and the U.S. military that Oracle can bring significant performance improvements and cost savings to IT systems running high-performance workloads in the cloud.
The latest enhancements to Oracle’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) portfolio, Ellison said, enable enterprises to solve production challenges by providing the ability to harness the benefits of cloud while retaining many of the benefits provided by a corporate data center.
Oracle Says Its Apps Are Cloud-Ready
About 95 percent of all Oracle applications have been rewritten for deployment in clouds, Ellison said.
“Workloads can be moved back and forth as needed from the data center to the cloud, with no difference in performance,” he said.
Oracle and its customers—most of which are institutional government, large enterprise and scientific in nature—are still in the middle of a decades-long journey interrupted by a brief cloud-bashing period that began 20 years ago when Ellison’s big idea was three-tier computing using a thin client. Thin clients as a business flattened out and started declining several years ago, and now Ellison’s network computing vision has become the standard cloud approach.
Key Facts on the New Cloud Services
Highlights of the new cloud services include:
Oracle Bare-Metal Cloud Services: This is a high-scale public cloud offering and includes bare-metal cloud servers in a fully virtualized network environment. The new services deliver high-performance database-as-service, network block storage, object storage and VPN connectivity. In addition, Oracle Bare-Metal Cloud Services provide a secure, private and high-performance software-defined Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) that allows customers to treat Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Services as a secure and elastic extension of their on-premise network. Additionally, Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Services maximize network throughput by providing direct connectivity between compute and storage nodes.
Oracle Ravello Cloud Service: Oracle claims that this is the first cloud service in the industry that enables enterprises to take enterprise VMware and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) workloads and run them in the public cloud without any changes. With Oracle Ravello Cloud Service, customers can run VMware natively on public clouds without requiring VM conversion, application reconfiguration or networking changes. It is also the only service in the industry that allows enterprises to have full L2 and L3 networking flexibility in the public cloud.
Oracle Container Cloud Service: This one provides enterprises with a Docker-compatible way to deploy application stacks with a single click. Registry integration capabilities, enterprise-grade application orchestration, and application scheduling and service scaling capabilities make the Oracle Container Cloud Service a notable option for cloud developers.
Oracle FastConnect, Standard and Partner editions: These help users reliably and securely connect their data center to the cloud. With the addition of Oracle FastConnect, Oracle says it now offers some of the broadest connectivity and peering options available in the industry, including IPsec VPN for easy setup, MPLS to connect to existing enterprise networks and Fast Connect for quick peering.
Oracle Cloud Platform offerings now also support Oracle MySQL Cloud Service, Oracle Big Data Cloud Service and Oracle Event Hub Cloud Service in addition to unparalleled support for Oracle’s existing PaaS offerings.