14 ms·

Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

109 points by forrestbrazeal 10y ago

batbomb 10y ago
This must be what the nebula team was a used for.
- pram 10y ago
  Nimbula, yes. It's so very bad. Oracle's IaaS cloud is a Potemkin village.
  - nixgeek 10y ago
    None of the 'Generation 2' stuff uses Nimbula.
    - pram 10y ago
      What is 'Generation 2' using then? Oracle VM Manager? Enterprise Manager? A handful of bash scripts for Exalogic provisioning? Puppet and Mcollective?
      - jvolkman 10y ago
        From last year: http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-has-special-team-working-on-new-public-cloud-2015-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-has-special-team-worki... Basically, this is a new product from a new team comprised of a bunch of ex-Amazon engineers in Seattle, among others.
        geodel 10y ago
        From the article: "..Oracle has been using very aggressive tactics to sell its current cloud platform. The company's sales team has resorted to the "nuclear option" of threatening a costly and expensive audit of other Oracle software products, then offering to skip the audit if the customer agrees to add cloud services." This will work well for them.
  - batbomb 10y ago
    No, not Nimbula. Nebula: http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-hires-nebula-employees-2015-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-hires-nebula-employees...
    - storyinmemo 10y ago
      They bought Nimbula back in 2013 as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimbula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimbula The naming was always confusing because both companies were based within a mile of each other, never mind the product overlap.
mataug 10y ago
> Ellison showed off a new Oracle Dense Cloud IO bare metal cloud server offering that will provide developers with 36 CPU cores, 512GB of D-RAM, and 28.8TB of SSD storage. AWS isn't merely about the compute. EC2 is just part of a larger ecosystem of infrastructure services that has been built out by amazon over the past 10 years. If Oracle thinks they can beat that, then more power to them but I'm not quite convinced. I'm happy that there's more competition but Oracle's offering seems more like empty words rather than concrete competition. Maybe they'll now stop pouring resources into the Google lawsuit and actually pursue building new useful products.
- blowski 10y ago
  Indeed, nothing in the press release suggests any kind of innovation. Initially, it sounds a lot cheaper than AWS - but the only pricing given is per core, nothing about RAM, network, storage, etc.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    Beating AWS on price is trivial, though. If you can't beat AWS on price, you have no business starting a cloud service. So it's a question whether they think they need to beat AWS on price or not. AWS pricing certainly makes it very clear that Amazon have no interest or need to compete on price - a lot of the cloud market is extremely price insensitive. It's a curious effect that seems to be largely down to businesses not used to paying as close attention to the long term opex costs of cloud infrastructure vs capex spend on servers etc.. E.g. I have had clients who paid more just for bandwidth with AWS than their whole infrastructure cost after migrating them elsewhere (AWS bandwidth is easily anywhere from 5x to 50x as expensive as elsewhere depending on location)
    - merb 10y ago
      > AWS bandwidth is easily anywhere from 5x to 50x as expensive as elsewhere depending on location Manpower and a Stable network is anywhere from 100x to 1000x as expensive as just hosting on AWS.
forrestbrazeal 10y ago
Based on this article alone, it sounds like Oracle is gunning for lift-and-shift of existing solutions into this bare-metal "cloud", positioning themselves more as an MSP than a true cloud provider. Is my read wrong here?
- jdc0589 10y ago
  thats what I'm thinking, at least for now. from elsewhere: > Bare IaaS still has its place for now, and at that point the major factors are hardware, uptime/reliability, and cost. Lots of companies either can't utilize SaaS/PaaS offerings from most cloud providers (regulatory requirements those providers don't comply with, etc...), or just have legacy products that aren't near EOL yet.
paragpatelone 10y ago
Oracle is not going to win, not matter what they do. Oracle is built on selling costly products and services versus operating in a low margin environment. 1.) Amazon has a much higher bar for hiring talent, than Oracle does. 2.) Amazon is internally use to being frugal, and so pricing wars are not going to hurt them. Oracle is use to charging a arm and a leg for their products. 3.) Amazon shareholders are already use to the company not being profitable, where as Oracle shareholders are not.
- kabdib 10y ago
  What customers are actually actively seeking to have a closer relationship with Oracle? I knew some Oracle engineers back in the day. They were sharp. I hope they made their millions and got the heck out of that place.
  - davidgerard 10y ago
    > What customers are actually actively seeking to have a closer relationship with Oracle? The people who sign the cheques and listen to their salespeople.
    - coredog64 10y ago
      My favorite memory from a former employer was eavesdropping on a call between our CIO and our Oracle representative. Oracle had told us we only needed to pay for production environments. Then, during a license audit, they claimed never to have said that and wanted to charge for all environments. I never got to hear the Oracle rep's side of the phone conversation, but everyone within 50 feet of the CIO's office got to hear his. "Fine! You want to fuck me on these licenses! Go right ahead! And then I'll turn around and fuck you by throwing you out of our datacenter!"
      - geodel 10y ago
        Good that it was possible for CIO throw away Oracle dependency just like that. Normally Oracle replacement with alternatives in big companies would be in order of decade not months or years. In those kind of places Oracle people would treat these threats as routine business discussion.
davidgerard 10y ago
So how easy is it to leave when Oracle stop running it as a loss leader?
- rbanffy 10y ago
  If your tech staff is worth anything, cheap.
dbalan 10y ago
Oracle built hardware == so Solaris on SPARC?
- simtel20 10y ago
  Afaik they are a linux cloud, like all the others.
chaotician 10y ago
I would not be surprised if the Oracle offerings turn out to be better than EC2 Oracle has been poaching the core EC2 team from Amazon for years now, in Seattle there are farewell parties every week for another person leaving EC2 to work at Oracle
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- aboralis 10y ago
  I would be. Good engineers can only make a good product if the management chain creates an environment for them to do it. Theres also a base level of hatred (lets not pretend its a loved company) oracle has to overcome to get people to use new products as well.
- stephengillie 10y ago
  Does this include network-layer personnel? Oracle is talking big about their compute, but it's useless without a robust and dynamic network infrastructure. Since storage fabrics are also networks today, a solid infrastructure is doubly-important, yet some data centers and MSPs seem to struggle with this core competency. * Since they seem to be targeting a hybrid approach, how flexible will they be at building and customizing network tunnels to multiple data centers and branch offices? * Will they allow you to host webservers there, or will you have to figure out how to network to another data center - and will it run Java, or can you get Apache or Docker? IIS with License Mobility? * What will they do about human error creating routing loops or erroneous BGP broadcasts, when they expand or perform maintenance? * How will they mitigate both external DDoS and compromised machine attacks from inside? Running a multi-data center MSP is no easy feat. It will be interesting to see what solutions are developed by Oracle's offering to the above problems.
  - rabidrat 10y ago
    > Does this include network-layer personnel? Yes. I used to work at a major networking company in Seattle, and Oracle has recruited many good people from there, and is paying them nose-ruining salaries. I think their cloud may have many problems, but I doubt networking infrastructure will be one of them.
Arnt 10y ago
On one level this is just typical bluster. "Oracle is going to launch a phone, so you might as well get used to it, 2015 was Apple's last profitable year." On another, why is such bluster typical? These people aren't stupid, I assume, so why even try such implausibly optimistic announcements? Does hubris lead to sales if you have Oracle-like customers?
- sra77 10y ago
  Oracle has one the most aggressive salesforces, they could sell combs to bald men. As long as they convince the non technical CXO teams thats all they need.
  - gaius 10y ago
    I attended an Oracle sales conference once (for the canapes, very good) and happened to be in the auditorium for one of the speakers. There were lasers. There was dry ice. Vanessa Mae was playing the electric violin. A director on stage bellowed we will bring $competitor TO THEIR KNEES! Everyone was on their feet cheering, I've been to metal gigs that were less intense. Oracle takes sales very, very seriously.
    - outside1234 10y ago
      The gotcha in all of this is that the brutal competition in the cloud means that there isn't the profit margin to pay for all of this glitz anymore in the business.
      - gaius 10y ago
        I don't doubt this lavish event paid for itself many, many times over in terms of how pumped up the sales people were to hit their numbers that year
    - Arnt 10y ago
      Granted. It's just that to my ears, Larry Ellison's announcement scores the wrong check marks: bluster: check hubris: check realism: nope I would have expected that someone who takes marketing very, very seriously tries to sound realistic, not overoptimistic or full of that which makes plants grow. Saying "oracle's database rocks" and asking for a stiff price has a certain touch of realism. I can see how a good salesforce can do that with success. My question is along the lines of: Can a good salesforce use bluster as a main tool to sell something shitty, such as oracle's IaaS offering? How does that sales process work?
ascendantlogic 10y ago
Knowing what we do about Oracle's licensing practices and how their sales people are basically just loan sharks that will take your kneecaps out if you don't pay their extortion fees, why would you ever want to put your entire operation in their hands? I would assume they'd have no issue cutting you off from your entire infrastructure at the drop of a hat if there was a billing dispute.
- greedo 10y ago
  Lets not act like the other vendors in the database arena are cherubim. MS, IBM, Oracle, NetApp, EMC, all perform audits, and try to squeeze the most out of large enterprises. They see large companies just like casinos; as whales. And part of that is because it's a lot easier to just buy the big packages than try to roll postgres or mysql into a stack built up on other OTS software. For example, I'd prefer to run Debian instead of RHEL, but since the stack I have to support uses Oracle and Websphere, my hands are tied.
  - gaius 10y ago
    I'd prefer to run Debian instead of RHEL, but since the stack I have to support uses Oracle Here you go: https://gaiustech.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/howto-install-oracle-on-debian-wheezy/ https://gaiustech.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/howto-install-ora...
    - greedo 10y ago
      And when you call up Oracle for support, they laugh and tell you to GTFO...
      - gaius 10y ago
        Have you ever called Oracle support? That would only be saving you time...
zharia 10y ago
Oracle is smoking some dang strong weed if they think they can compete with AWS
zharia 10y ago
Oracle is smoking some dang strong weed if they honestly think they can compete with AWS. AWS does so well because they have a history of opening their platforms up, Oracle does the exact opposite
- gaius 10y ago
  Yes and no. AWS has bet on cloud-means-public-cloud. Azure and Oracle are betting on hybrid: they'll sell you a private cloud that sits in your own DC that can interoperate seamlessly with their public cloud. AWS is a no-brainer if you're a greenfield, but the jury's still out on brownfield.
  - Jtsummers 10y ago
    Which also makes it more viable for government contracts. This is like looking at any other marketshare debate. Amazon/Google may win the majority of users, but MS and Oracle are going to get the ones with deep pockets. They don't need me and my piddly weekend project, or most startups. They'll make a mint off a handful of lucrative government contracts, and contracts with the defense contractors that go Oracle because the gov't has pushed it.
    - serge2k 10y ago
      That's why AWS has https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/ https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/
    - discodave 10y ago
      Deep pockets like the CIA? http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-details-about-the-cias-deal-with-amazon/374632/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-de... The moral of the story is: AWS is all public cloud, but if you're the CIA and give them $600MM... you can have a private cloud too!
    - jacques_chester 10y ago
      Microsoft have the head start on enterprise and SME sales, AWS have the head start on total customers. But Google are quick studies, have a vast amount of already-paid-for infrastructure and software, and as much cash as the others.
ravenstine 10y ago
To be honest, working with Oracle tech would be reason enough for me to quit my job and work elsewhere. We've now witnessed decades of Oracle's business practices and I really wouldn't bother with any of it at this point. Just using their junkware helps them thrive by turning employers into enablers.
- rbanffy 10y ago
  Solaris is not that bad. But then, it's Sun's technology, not Oracle's...
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
A lot of people have made comments on the tech. But there's another issue here: trust. How many people are going to be willing to trust Oracle with their data? They don't exactly have the best reputation, and they don't have the best track record either. And what they did to Solaris just makes it worse. Also, Larry Ellison has a history of overselling whatever Oracle's doing, so I doubt the product will be as good as he says in any case.
- pfooti 10y ago
  That is exactly what I was thinking. Oracle can do pretty decent stuff with tech as far as I have seen, but their actual direction and choices seems to embody the crassly-disgusting money squeeze corporation so much that I really don't want to do business with them. I mean, they put crapware in the consumer JRE installer. How many dollars did they get for that, versus how much negative feeling from that alone? This seems like a corporation who owns their terrible reputation, and says, "who cares? we're still rich."
  - saiya-jin 10y ago
    there is no attempt to disguise anything - Oracle is your typical stock evil corp, full package. they are pretty damn consistent about it too. they have couple of decent products that they evolve as little as necessary to maintain position, but everything else about them is a big no-no.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      If it could get into all the industries, Oracle would literally be Mr. Robot's ECorp.
      - ghurtado 10y ago
        Or, you know, Cyberdyne Systems - the creators of SkyNet: http://www.businessinsider.com/terminator-genisys-cyberdyne-based-on-oracle-2015-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/terminator-genisys-cyberdyne-...
baconner 10y ago
They may be gunning for AWS, azure, etc publicly but I'd bet the main consumers of this service will be existing Oracle ERP (and other business apps) customers. They're already just fine with paying a fortune and having an iaas backing gives Oracle another way to squeeze a bit more out. We already run your erp in Oracle's iaas, you should bring your other applications up as well, and so on. Evil empire comments aside more cloud infrastructure competition is good for us all.
serge2k 10y ago
> IDC program director Al Hilwa wrote in an email that he had little doubt Oracle would be a major force in the cloud, and is building momentum. The quote they use doesn't sound like he has "little doubt" > "In terms of market leadership, I think Oracle will have to produce much faster growth rates to really get ahead of Amazon or even Microsoft in IaaS, and analysts will be watching its spend on data-centers to track this," he said.
CodeSheikh 10y ago
AWS has many advantages over competitors and one prominent one that stands out the most is Lambda platform. Once customers are tied in to it (very symbiotic code) they would prefer not to move to similar offerings by Oracle or another company unless the cost savings are astronomical enough to motivate otherwise. (I heavily use Lambda)
ap22213 10y ago
At least Oracle has the Fortune 500 FUD going for them. But, to think that they can easily beat an entrenched incumbent like AWS is a little much. I mean even Google, with their positive brand, hordes of cash, and guerrilla ad campaign (on this site and others) can barely make a dent.
throwawayLink 10y ago
...Because I totally want to use cloud infrastructure by the company that supports Java.
davidf18 10y ago
Oracle has substantially more support staff and support infrastructure in place with existing (mid to large) firms than Amazon, Google, Apple (Microsoft is the exception). In a sense, their "market" and competitor is more like IBM (and Microsoft) and not Amazon, but notably, they offer prices to small firms that are lower than Amazon's at least for services that they, Oracle, do provide.
ashayh 10y ago
Has Oracle given any details about their underlying technology, other than what we assume was acquired from Nimbula and others? Do they know how to build a datacenter for IAAS/PASS at the same level as Amazon, Google, MS? Amazon and other large players have made fundamental innovations in how they construct custom X86 servers, Virtual servers & custom layer 2/3 networks at large scale. They don't just rack together Dell/HP servers & connect them with Cisco switches/routers, then slap a webui on top of it. That would just be putting lipstick on a pig. It doesn't matter if its a large pig with 64 Cpu cores.
djhworld 10y ago
AWS isn't just about EC2 though. They offer quite an extraordinary breadth of managed services, whether it be queuing/messaging/Notifications (Kinesis, SQS, SNS), to databases (RDS, Aurora, Redshift), cluster based computing (EMR), object storage (S3), quite fine grained access control (IAM), monitoring (cloudwatch), infrastructure as code (cloudformation).... The list goes on, I don't see this Oracle offering much more than just being a bit of a cheaper version of EC2
misiogames 10y ago
How I read this: "we will double down on license audits, if we found you breaching our contract we will pardon you if you move to our jail or face the fines"
unabridged 10y ago
If you want to beat AWS fight them on data transfer pricing. $90 per TB is the reason many people choose budget clouds or dedicated hardware. Amazon's own pricing reveals how much markup they have when they drop to $50 per TB publicly for high volume and probably $20 per TB for "Contact Us"-level volume.
wahsd 10y ago
There are far better candidates to depose Amazon if people can move beyond the name recognition of AWS.
faragon 10y ago
In addition to the cheap 2 Xeon socket configuration, I would love to see Oracle offering fault-tolerant, mainframe reliability level, infrastructure. Also, "SPARC big iron as a service"...
dredmorbius 10y ago
Oracle had a cloud compute capacity, as Sun Microsystems, billed as "Sun Cloud" or "Sun Grid". Launched in 2006, it failed to attract interest. The product was discontinued in 2010. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Cloud https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Cloud
based2 10y ago
https://www.oracle.com/openworld/on-demand/index.html https://www.oracle.com/openworld/on-demand/index.html
ryanmarsh 10y ago
If anyone still needs proof that having a competitive IaaS offering is not just about capex just watch Oracle burn piles of money and totally fuck this up.
ilaksh 10y ago
The advertising from this company is so false and pricing so outrageous it is essentially fraud. If you want to embarrass your tech people then make them use this 'cloud'.
edpichler 10y ago
Competition is always good. PS: It just passed through my mind: some corp. should be able to compete with Google (mainly on search engine and ads), before they become "too powerful".
stevehiehn 10y ago
Nice. Your move Amazon. Time to drop your prices :D
matt_wulfeck 10y ago
Is Oracle paying more for talent than its competitors, namely Google or AWS? Until the answer is "yes" I'm not going to believe their statements about a better cloud. Otherwise they're competing on niche or price, and that's not going to stop the gorilla.
- jvolkman 10y ago
  At least compared to AWS, rumors are that the answer has been "hell yes" for a couple of years now.
a-no-n 10y ago
Hopefully, this is just a token move to gain leverage to hostilely acquire AWS from Amazon. Even without that, there are enough potential shops whom run Oracle DBMS / J2EE stacks whom would gladly pay for managed well-managed, -secured IaaS/PaaS offerings. Throw in Solaris (cloudified similarly to SmartOS), SAN storage and enterprise folks will sit up and take notice. It just seems sort of late to the party and HP already made a go it. Such an offering must be demonstrably optimized for segment(s) (competing head-on with the commodification of AWS would be pointless) and sales/migration prof svcs efforts must actively hustle customers to switch with provable TCO savings and operational agility. PS: I did such with a consulting team early on to bring enterprise folks onto AWS with hard-core financial and other high-importance apps. Folks may not realize how generally well-managed and physically-secured are AWS customer-facing boxes. Amazon has deep pockets, massive scale, category-defining experience, many complementary offerings, first-mover advantage and brand recognition.
sengork 10y ago
A vertically integrated public cloud platform where the provider controls both the hardware/firmware/hypervisors/OS/applications/middleware. As far as I know this is first of a kind platform. What will ultimately determine it's success is adoption and not the technology potential itself. Let's see what happens it'll be interesting to observe the impact of this.
orsenthil 10y ago
Why is he not running in this election against Trump? We would have some "make x great again" debates.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
caseymarquis 10y ago
I coincidentally have a meeting with some sales reps and an engineer about their cloud infrastructure this afternoon. Anyone have questions they'd like asked? I'm trying to figure out if we can get our enterprise customers to trust their private cloud tech and then deploy our products within it. It's a long shot, but I have trouble saying no to sales people before there's money involved.

109 points by forrestbrazeal 10y ago

batbomb 10y ago

This must be what the nebula team was a used for.

pram 10y ago
Nimbula, yes. It's so very bad. Oracle's IaaS cloud is a Potemkin village.
- nixgeek 10y ago
  None of the 'Generation 2' stuff uses Nimbula.
  - pram 10y ago
    What is 'Generation 2' using then? Oracle VM Manager? Enterprise Manager? A handful of bash scripts for Exalogic provisioning? Puppet and Mcollective?
    - jvolkman 10y ago
      From last year: http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-has-special-team-working-on-new-public-cloud-2015-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-has-special-team-worki... Basically, this is a new product from a new team comprised of a bunch of ex-Amazon engineers in Seattle, among others.
      - geodel 10y ago
        From the article: "..Oracle has been using very aggressive tactics to sell its current cloud platform. The company's sales team has resorted to the "nuclear option" of threatening a costly and expensive audit of other Oracle software products, then offering to skip the audit if the customer agrees to add cloud services." This will work well for them.
- batbomb 10y ago
  No, not Nimbula. Nebula: http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-hires-nebula-employees-2015-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-hires-nebula-employees...
  - storyinmemo 10y ago
    They bought Nimbula back in 2013 as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimbula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimbula The naming was always confusing because both companies were based within a mile of each other, never mind the product overlap.

mataug 10y ago

> Ellison showed off a new Oracle Dense Cloud IO bare metal cloud server offering that will provide developers with 36 CPU cores, 512GB of D-RAM, and 28.8TB of SSD storage. AWS isn't merely about the compute. EC2 is just part of a larger ecosystem of infrastructure services that has been built out by amazon over the past 10 years. If Oracle thinks they can beat that, then more power to them but I'm not quite convinced. I'm happy that there's more competition but Oracle's offering seems more like empty words rather than concrete competition. Maybe they'll now stop pouring resources into the Google lawsuit and actually pursue building new useful products.

blowski 10y ago
Indeed, nothing in the press release suggests any kind of innovation. Initially, it sounds a lot cheaper than AWS - but the only pricing given is per core, nothing about RAM, network, storage, etc.
- vidarh 10y ago
  Beating AWS on price is trivial, though. If you can't beat AWS on price, you have no business starting a cloud service. So it's a question whether they think they need to beat AWS on price or not. AWS pricing certainly makes it very clear that Amazon have no interest or need to compete on price - a lot of the cloud market is extremely price insensitive. It's a curious effect that seems to be largely down to businesses not used to paying as close attention to the long term opex costs of cloud infrastructure vs capex spend on servers etc.. E.g. I have had clients who paid more just for bandwidth with AWS than their whole infrastructure cost after migrating them elsewhere (AWS bandwidth is easily anywhere from 5x to 50x as expensive as elsewhere depending on location)
  - merb 10y ago
    > AWS bandwidth is easily anywhere from 5x to 50x as expensive as elsewhere depending on location Manpower and a Stable network is anywhere from 100x to 1000x as expensive as just hosting on AWS.

forrestbrazeal 10y ago

Based on this article alone, it sounds like Oracle is gunning for lift-and-shift of existing solutions into this bare-metal "cloud", positioning themselves more as an MSP than a true cloud provider. Is my read wrong here?

jdc0589 10y ago
thats what I'm thinking, at least for now. from elsewhere: > Bare IaaS still has its place for now, and at that point the major factors are hardware, uptime/reliability, and cost. Lots of companies either can't utilize SaaS/PaaS offerings from most cloud providers (regulatory requirements those providers don't comply with, etc...), or just have legacy products that aren't near EOL yet.

paragpatelone 10y ago

Oracle is not going to win, not matter what they do. Oracle is built on selling costly products and services versus operating in a low margin environment. 1.) Amazon has a much higher bar for hiring talent, than Oracle does. 2.) Amazon is internally use to being frugal, and so pricing wars are not going to hurt them. Oracle is use to charging a arm and a leg for their products. 3.) Amazon shareholders are already use to the company not being profitable, where as Oracle shareholders are not.

kabdib 10y ago
What customers are actually actively seeking to have a closer relationship with Oracle? I knew some Oracle engineers back in the day. They were sharp. I hope they made their millions and got the heck out of that place.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  > What customers are actually actively seeking to have a closer relationship with Oracle? The people who sign the cheques and listen to their salespeople.
  - coredog64 10y ago
    My favorite memory from a former employer was eavesdropping on a call between our CIO and our Oracle representative. Oracle had told us we only needed to pay for production environments. Then, during a license audit, they claimed never to have said that and wanted to charge for all environments. I never got to hear the Oracle rep's side of the phone conversation, but everyone within 50 feet of the CIO's office got to hear his. "Fine! You want to fuck me on these licenses! Go right ahead! And then I'll turn around and fuck you by throwing you out of our datacenter!"
    - geodel 10y ago
      Good that it was possible for CIO throw away Oracle dependency just like that. Normally Oracle replacement with alternatives in big companies would be in order of decade not months or years. In those kind of places Oracle people would treat these threats as routine business discussion.

davidgerard 10y ago

So how easy is it to leave when Oracle stop running it as a loss leader?

rbanffy 10y ago
If your tech staff is worth anything, cheap.

dbalan 10y ago

Oracle built hardware == so Solaris on SPARC?

simtel20 10y ago
Afaik they are a linux cloud, like all the others.

chaotician 10y ago

I would not be surprised if the Oracle offerings turn out to be better than EC2 Oracle has been poaching the core EC2 team from Amazon for years now, in Seattle there are farewell parties every week for another person leaving EC2 to work at Oracle

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
aboralis 10y ago
I would be. Good engineers can only make a good product if the management chain creates an environment for them to do it. Theres also a base level of hatred (lets not pretend its a loved company) oracle has to overcome to get people to use new products as well.
stephengillie 10y ago
Does this include network-layer personnel? Oracle is talking big about their compute, but it's useless without a robust and dynamic network infrastructure. Since storage fabrics are also networks today, a solid infrastructure is doubly-important, yet some data centers and MSPs seem to struggle with this core competency. * Since they seem to be targeting a hybrid approach, how flexible will they be at building and customizing network tunnels to multiple data centers and branch offices? * Will they allow you to host webservers there, or will you have to figure out how to network to another data center - and will it run Java, or can you get Apache or Docker? IIS with License Mobility? * What will they do about human error creating routing loops or erroneous BGP broadcasts, when they expand or perform maintenance? * How will they mitigate both external DDoS and compromised machine attacks from inside? Running a multi-data center MSP is no easy feat. It will be interesting to see what solutions are developed by Oracle's offering to the above problems.
- rabidrat 10y ago
  > Does this include network-layer personnel? Yes. I used to work at a major networking company in Seattle, and Oracle has recruited many good people from there, and is paying them nose-ruining salaries. I think their cloud may have many problems, but I doubt networking infrastructure will be one of them.

Arnt 10y ago

On one level this is just typical bluster. "Oracle is going to launch a phone, so you might as well get used to it, 2015 was Apple's last profitable year." On another, why is such bluster typical? These people aren't stupid, I assume, so why even try such implausibly optimistic announcements? Does hubris lead to sales if you have Oracle-like customers?

sra77 10y ago
Oracle has one the most aggressive salesforces, they could sell combs to bald men. As long as they convince the non technical CXO teams thats all they need.
- gaius 10y ago
  I attended an Oracle sales conference once (for the canapes, very good) and happened to be in the auditorium for one of the speakers. There were lasers. There was dry ice. Vanessa Mae was playing the electric violin. A director on stage bellowed we will bring $competitor TO THEIR KNEES! Everyone was on their feet cheering, I've been to metal gigs that were less intense. Oracle takes sales very, very seriously.
  - outside1234 10y ago
    The gotcha in all of this is that the brutal competition in the cloud means that there isn't the profit margin to pay for all of this glitz anymore in the business.
    - gaius 10y ago
      I don't doubt this lavish event paid for itself many, many times over in terms of how pumped up the sales people were to hit their numbers that year
  - Arnt 10y ago
    Granted. It's just that to my ears, Larry Ellison's announcement scores the wrong check marks: bluster: check hubris: check realism: nope I would have expected that someone who takes marketing very, very seriously tries to sound realistic, not overoptimistic or full of that which makes plants grow. Saying "oracle's database rocks" and asking for a stiff price has a certain touch of realism. I can see how a good salesforce can do that with success. My question is along the lines of: Can a good salesforce use bluster as a main tool to sell something shitty, such as oracle's IaaS offering? How does that sales process work?

ascendantlogic 10y ago

Knowing what we do about Oracle's licensing practices and how their sales people are basically just loan sharks that will take your kneecaps out if you don't pay their extortion fees, why would you ever want to put your entire operation in their hands? I would assume they'd have no issue cutting you off from your entire infrastructure at the drop of a hat if there was a billing dispute.

greedo 10y ago
Lets not act like the other vendors in the database arena are cherubim. MS, IBM, Oracle, NetApp, EMC, all perform audits, and try to squeeze the most out of large enterprises. They see large companies just like casinos; as whales. And part of that is because it's a lot easier to just buy the big packages than try to roll postgres or mysql into a stack built up on other OTS software. For example, I'd prefer to run Debian instead of RHEL, but since the stack I have to support uses Oracle and Websphere, my hands are tied.
- gaius 10y ago
  I'd prefer to run Debian instead of RHEL, but since the stack I have to support uses Oracle Here you go: https://gaiustech.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/howto-install-oracle-on-debian-wheezy/ https://gaiustech.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/howto-install-ora...
  - greedo 10y ago
    And when you call up Oracle for support, they laugh and tell you to GTFO...
    - gaius 10y ago
      Have you ever called Oracle support? That would only be saving you time...

zharia 10y ago

Oracle is smoking some dang strong weed if they think they can compete with AWS

zharia 10y ago

Oracle is smoking some dang strong weed if they honestly think they can compete with AWS. AWS does so well because they have a history of opening their platforms up, Oracle does the exact opposite

gaius 10y ago
Yes and no. AWS has bet on cloud-means-public-cloud. Azure and Oracle are betting on hybrid: they'll sell you a private cloud that sits in your own DC that can interoperate seamlessly with their public cloud. AWS is a no-brainer if you're a greenfield, but the jury's still out on brownfield.
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  Which also makes it more viable for government contracts. This is like looking at any other marketshare debate. Amazon/Google may win the majority of users, but MS and Oracle are going to get the ones with deep pockets. They don't need me and my piddly weekend project, or most startups. They'll make a mint off a handful of lucrative government contracts, and contracts with the defense contractors that go Oracle because the gov't has pushed it.
  - serge2k 10y ago
    That's why AWS has https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/ https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/
  - discodave 10y ago
    Deep pockets like the CIA? http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-details-about-the-cias-deal-with-amazon/374632/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-de... The moral of the story is: AWS is all public cloud, but if you're the CIA and give them $600MM... you can have a private cloud too!
  - jacques_chester 10y ago
    Microsoft have the head start on enterprise and SME sales, AWS have the head start on total customers. But Google are quick studies, have a vast amount of already-paid-for infrastructure and software, and as much cash as the others.

ravenstine 10y ago

To be honest, working with Oracle tech would be reason enough for me to quit my job and work elsewhere. We've now witnessed decades of Oracle's business practices and I really wouldn't bother with any of it at this point. Just using their junkware helps them thrive by turning employers into enablers.

rbanffy 10y ago
Solaris is not that bad. But then, it's Sun's technology, not Oracle's...

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

A lot of people have made comments on the tech. But there's another issue here: trust. How many people are going to be willing to trust Oracle with their data? They don't exactly have the best reputation, and they don't have the best track record either. And what they did to Solaris just makes it worse. Also, Larry Ellison has a history of overselling whatever Oracle's doing, so I doubt the product will be as good as he says in any case.

pfooti 10y ago
That is exactly what I was thinking. Oracle can do pretty decent stuff with tech as far as I have seen, but their actual direction and choices seems to embody the crassly-disgusting money squeeze corporation so much that I really don't want to do business with them. I mean, they put crapware in the consumer JRE installer. How many dollars did they get for that, versus how much negative feeling from that alone? This seems like a corporation who owns their terrible reputation, and says, "who cares? we're still rich."
- saiya-jin 10y ago
  there is no attempt to disguise anything - Oracle is your typical stock evil corp, full package. they are pretty damn consistent about it too. they have couple of decent products that they evolve as little as necessary to maintain position, but everything else about them is a big no-no.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    If it could get into all the industries, Oracle would literally be Mr. Robot's ECorp.
    - ghurtado 10y ago
      Or, you know, Cyberdyne Systems - the creators of SkyNet: http://www.businessinsider.com/terminator-genisys-cyberdyne-based-on-oracle-2015-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/terminator-genisys-cyberdyne-...

baconner 10y ago

They may be gunning for AWS, azure, etc publicly but I'd bet the main consumers of this service will be existing Oracle ERP (and other business apps) customers. They're already just fine with paying a fortune and having an iaas backing gives Oracle another way to squeeze a bit more out. We already run your erp in Oracle's iaas, you should bring your other applications up as well, and so on. Evil empire comments aside more cloud infrastructure competition is good for us all.

serge2k 10y ago

> IDC program director Al Hilwa wrote in an email that he had little doubt Oracle would be a major force in the cloud, and is building momentum. The quote they use doesn't sound like he has "little doubt" > "In terms of market leadership, I think Oracle will have to produce much faster growth rates to really get ahead of Amazon or even Microsoft in IaaS, and analysts will be watching its spend on data-centers to track this," he said.

CodeSheikh 10y ago

AWS has many advantages over competitors and one prominent one that stands out the most is Lambda platform. Once customers are tied in to it (very symbiotic code) they would prefer not to move to similar offerings by Oracle or another company unless the cost savings are astronomical enough to motivate otherwise. (I heavily use Lambda)

ap22213 10y ago

At least Oracle has the Fortune 500 FUD going for them. But, to think that they can easily beat an entrenched incumbent like AWS is a little much. I mean even Google, with their positive brand, hordes of cash, and guerrilla ad campaign (on this site and others) can barely make a dent.

throwawayLink 10y ago

...Because I totally want to use cloud infrastructure by the company that supports Java.

davidf18 10y ago

Oracle has substantially more support staff and support infrastructure in place with existing (mid to large) firms than Amazon, Google, Apple (Microsoft is the exception). In a sense, their "market" and competitor is more like IBM (and Microsoft) and not Amazon, but notably, they offer prices to small firms that are lower than Amazon's at least for services that they, Oracle, do provide.

ashayh 10y ago

Has Oracle given any details about their underlying technology, other than what we assume was acquired from Nimbula and others? Do they know how to build a datacenter for IAAS/PASS at the same level as Amazon, Google, MS? Amazon and other large players have made fundamental innovations in how they construct custom X86 servers, Virtual servers & custom layer 2/3 networks at large scale. They don't just rack together Dell/HP servers & connect them with Cisco switches/routers, then slap a webui on top of it. That would just be putting lipstick on a pig. It doesn't matter if its a large pig with 64 Cpu cores.

djhworld 10y ago

AWS isn't just about EC2 though. They offer quite an extraordinary breadth of managed services, whether it be queuing/messaging/Notifications (Kinesis, SQS, SNS), to databases (RDS, Aurora, Redshift), cluster based computing (EMR), object storage (S3), quite fine grained access control (IAM), monitoring (cloudwatch), infrastructure as code (cloudformation).... The list goes on, I don't see this Oracle offering much more than just being a bit of a cheaper version of EC2

misiogames 10y ago

How I read this: "we will double down on license audits, if we found you breaching our contract we will pardon you if you move to our jail or face the fines"

unabridged 10y ago

If you want to beat AWS fight them on data transfer pricing. $90 per TB is the reason many people choose budget clouds or dedicated hardware. Amazon's own pricing reveals how much markup they have when they drop to $50 per TB publicly for high volume and probably $20 per TB for "Contact Us"-level volume.

wahsd 10y ago

There are far better candidates to depose Amazon if people can move beyond the name recognition of AWS.

faragon 10y ago

In addition to the cheap 2 Xeon socket configuration, I would love to see Oracle offering fault-tolerant, mainframe reliability level, infrastructure. Also, "SPARC big iron as a service"...

dredmorbius 10y ago

Oracle had a cloud compute capacity, as Sun Microsystems, billed as "Sun Cloud" or "Sun Grid". Launched in 2006, it failed to attract interest. The product was discontinued in 2010. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Cloud https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Cloud

based2 10y ago

https://www.oracle.com/openworld/on-demand/index.html https://www.oracle.com/openworld/on-demand/index.html

ryanmarsh 10y ago

If anyone still needs proof that having a competitive IaaS offering is not just about capex just watch Oracle burn piles of money and totally fuck this up.

ilaksh 10y ago

The advertising from this company is so false and pricing so outrageous it is essentially fraud. If you want to embarrass your tech people then make them use this 'cloud'.

edpichler 10y ago

Competition is always good. PS: It just passed through my mind: some corp. should be able to compete with Google (mainly on search engine and ads), before they become "too powerful".

stevehiehn 10y ago

Nice. Your move Amazon. Time to drop your prices :D

matt_wulfeck 10y ago

Is Oracle paying more for talent than its competitors, namely Google or AWS? Until the answer is "yes" I'm not going to believe their statements about a better cloud. Otherwise they're competing on niche or price, and that's not going to stop the gorilla.

jvolkman 10y ago
At least compared to AWS, rumors are that the answer has been "hell yes" for a couple of years now.

a-no-n 10y ago

Hopefully, this is just a token move to gain leverage to hostilely acquire AWS from Amazon. Even without that, there are enough potential shops whom run Oracle DBMS / J2EE stacks whom would gladly pay for managed well-managed, -secured IaaS/PaaS offerings. Throw in Solaris (cloudified similarly to SmartOS), SAN storage and enterprise folks will sit up and take notice. It just seems sort of late to the party and HP already made a go it. Such an offering must be demonstrably optimized for segment(s) (competing head-on with the commodification of AWS would be pointless) and sales/migration prof svcs efforts must actively hustle customers to switch with provable TCO savings and operational agility. PS: I did such with a consulting team early on to bring enterprise folks onto AWS with hard-core financial and other high-importance apps. Folks may not realize how generally well-managed and physically-secured are AWS customer-facing boxes. Amazon has deep pockets, massive scale, category-defining experience, many complementary offerings, first-mover advantage and brand recognition.

sengork 10y ago

A vertically integrated public cloud platform where the provider controls both the hardware/firmware/hypervisors/OS/applications/middleware. As far as I know this is first of a kind platform. What will ultimately determine it's success is adoption and not the technology potential itself. Let's see what happens it'll be interesting to observe the impact of this.

orsenthil 10y ago

Why is he not running in this election against Trump? We would have some "make x great again" debates.

deleted 10y ago

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caseymarquis 10y ago

I coincidentally have a meeting with some sales reps and an engineer about their cloud infrastructure this afternoon. Anyone have questions they'd like asked? I'm trying to figure out if we can get our enterprise customers to trust their private cloud tech and then deploy our products within it. It's a long shot, but I have trouble saying no to sales people before there's money involved.