16 ms·

Oracle’s Cloudy Future

195 points by craigkerstiens 10y ago

nowey 10y ago
Oracle has IaaS and PaaS solutions now....
- colemannerd 10y ago
  and the point of the article is that they're light and provide no where near the optionality and features of AWS.
  - bduerst 10y ago
    Amazon doesn't really have a PaaS though, right?
    - dmourati 10y ago
      One could argue the entire suite of AWS products make up a PaaS. One could also argue that Elastic Beanstalk is their standalone PaaS offering. https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/ https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/
      - bduerst 10y ago
        Except that isn't really a PaaS when stacked up to the others like App Engine, Heroku, and Azure.
- suyash 10y ago
  IaaS, PaaS and SaaS - all three layers of the Cloud.
tmptmp 10y ago
I am happy Oracle is losing this battle (edit: or at least feeling the heat), one sort of personal reason is that they have killed/crippled many open source projects. Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something goes wrong. Similar is true for MS too. But if you really want to see your money well spent, Oracle is not at all the way. The recent decision by Yandex to shift from Oracle to Postgres should be seen here. [1] [1] https://www.pgcon.org/2016/schedule/attachments/426_2016.05.19%20Yandex.Mail%20success%20story.pdf https://www.pgcon.org/2016/schedule/attachments/426_2016.05....
- b2m9 10y ago
  > Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something goes wrong. Well, this can be said for any big business software company. It's the same story with SAP, IBM and friends. Business software is simply not about spending money well.
  - strictnein 10y ago
    Business software is about regulatory compliance. That is the baked in value that these behemoths offer.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Big companies are often are complicated mess, and I can emphasize with desire to simplify and streamline operation. There's some benefit with setting your infrastructure in such a way that there's a known party you can pay to fix things quickly, and that you can sue if they can't.
    - AndyNemmity 10y ago
      Often they also like to stay understaffed in IT, so having consistent vendors, and similar systems allows them to keep just a few guys around that have any clue how it works, and supplement with consultants and vendor support.
  - AndyNemmity 10y ago
    People say that a lot, but I work with customers all the time who are very happy with their solutions. I don't disagree that some people hate them, or hate this or that ui, but I can think to many companies/interactions with people that love the products. That's never really expressed places like here. It's just "not spending money well", when I think there are legitimate positives to a lot of business software.
    - b2m9 10y ago
      I don't claim that I know the ultimate truth, but I worked for many years for one of those big business software companies. But from my experience, only the people who don't have to interact with such products in any form like it. (Who are often also making the decision to purchase it) It happened only a few times that users of such products (analysts, admins, support, devs, ...) told me that they like this or that. And I still remember each one of those guys and girls. (Weren't that many) I know what those companies charge for their software and maintenance. I've been involved in the development of those products for a couple of years. And my very personal opinion is: they're not worth their money. No matter what a customer tells the press how much easier their business is after purchasing product X from company Y. As I said, it's my personal opinion on that matter.
calpaterson 10y ago
This is a wonderful explanation of the original rationale for relational databases. Periodically poeple re-invent IMS' hierarchical design only to rediscover why relations are important. MongoDB's "document database" is a current example.
- js8 10y ago
  Actually, I just got a little training on IMS last week, and I have to say, IMS should be reinvented. But not for its weaknesses (hierarchy), but for its strengths (speed). The idea that the application program gets a compiled representation of the exact data pointers that are in the database, and those data pointers optimized for the problem, is very sound, IMHO. IMS is very close to the metal, at the expense of flexibility, and that's how it should be reinvented.
  - calpaterson 10y ago
    There is definitely a place for that.
  - Jweb_Guru 10y ago
    That's essentially the idea behind Protobuf and friends, is it not? It's not quite as optimized because there's a bounds check, but that's about it (and in many languages you can't get around a NULL or bounds check anyway, and just rely on the branch predictor).
    - js8 10y ago
      Protobuf is not a database. What comes close is DataDraw, but that is an embedded database, not a server.
      - Jweb_Guru 10y ago
        I don't understand your meaning, then... lots of database systems have hardcoded fixed pointer offsets for data structures, and some even compile queries into bytecode with those hardcoded pointer paths (for instance, HyPeR does this using LLVM, and I think some other column-stores do as well). Is your issue that those databases aren't hierarchical? On modern machines, pointer chasing is much slower than predictable sequential memory access, so that model doesn't seem like the performance win it was in the past... maybe I'm wrong.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
gizmodo59 10y ago
A genuine question: If you have worked with any fortune 500/1000 companies (Lets pick non software based companies) either directly or if they are your customers, how many of them use Oracle database or SQL Server? Some of the reasons why this trend WILL continue: 1. Critical software like databases needs support. To the point where there should be someone who can come on premise to fix things. 2. We need to use X because X is used by other big corporations and you never get fired for choosing X. 3. The products (Oracle,MS SQL) are not that bad. (Not sure if there is a better way to put this) I could be wrong, but I can't think of any other important reason. Can anyone pitch in their experience?
- pdevr 10y ago
  Also, the fact that once you have almost complete monopoly in the enterprise market, only a huge paradigm shift will knock you down. Most of the times, the market leaders are able to adapt, and the clients give them a lot of leeway - not the least because of the points which you pointed out.
- godzillabrennus 10y ago
  Business managers will get charged with making tech decisions for projects and they will choose brands they trust.
  - AndyNemmity 10y ago
    Or with brands that others trust within the same space. Other companies, friends of theirs working in other companies, conferences, etc. It becomes a self perpetuating system.
- ako 10y ago
  Because it's in the upper right gartner quadrant.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- 10y ago
pdevr 10y ago
If you want to know the history of Oracle, "Softwar" is an excellent book. It includes Ellison's notes too, wherever he felt he needed to add them.
geodel 10y ago
Oracle is going to be hobbled by Cloud providers in similar manner as TV networks by Netflix. If Oracle reduce access of its software to Cloud infrastructure providers then they lose potential revenue stream and Cloud providers can start promoting alternatives. On the other hand if cloud providers have access to Oracle products in their cloud then Oracle cloud looks unimpressive to customers and no reason to use Oracle cloud. Like networks learned that must watch shows are decreasing on their networks in last few year Oracle will learn their software is must for decreasing number of customers.
jdcarter 10y ago
What a lot of these analysts overlook is why Oracle is trying to take on Amazon, despite being years late to the party. I believe it's a defensive move: Oracle is seeing long-time customers deploy new applications in AWS, and that customer starts to realize, "hey, that went pretty well, why not move more of my stuff to AWS?" Their Oracle sales rep comes calling, and suddenly a once-reliable customer needs fewer Oracle licenses than last year. Oracle therefore needs an answer to those customers transitioning to the cloud; they want their own cloud to sell. Oracle can undercut Amazon on price--even run their own cloud offerings at a loss for a while--because losing some money on their cloud is better than losing customers from their high-margin products.
- toyg 10y ago
  > why Oracle is trying to take on Amazon, despite being years late to the party. I believe it's a defensive move Ellison is all about the money. When "the cloud" started, he quietly bankrolled a bunch of companies spearheading the space, so he didn't have to risk his cash-cow. Once the space was proven, he's steered the whole company - and he didn't do it yesterday, he's done it about 6 years ago. You're seeing results today because Oracle is large, it takes a while to release stuff that has almost been rewritten from scratch to fit the new paradigm, and it takes even more to sell it to Oracle's very conservative userbase. If it succeeds, the subscription model will make Oracle even more money than before. However, they are effectively rewriting from scratch a large number of their products; this is why they are very limited. It will take another 5 years before they can reach feature-parity with on-premise solutions, assuming on-prem doesn't get anything new in the meantime. Performance is also pretty dismal for some cloud products at the moment.
  - jdcarter 10y ago
    Oracle selling higher-end products as a service makes total sense, and I agree, the subscription model has potential to make them a good deal of money. What I'm getting at, however, is why are they so aggressively taking on Amazon in the IaaS space? That's the part which doesn't make sense on the surface--they show up late and then attempt to compete on price. Since when has Oracle competed on price? The conclusion I come to is that Amazon must be eating away at their customer base. Once a customer starts to move some of their IT into AWS, and it goes well, that puts Oracle on the defensive--not a spot they like to be in. I doubt Oracle really wants to be in the IaaS business just for the sake of IaaS. They want to focus on higher-margin services. The IaaS part must be a defensive move to keep customers away from AWS and within the Oracle ecosystem.
SEJeff 10y ago
Quote Larry Ellison in 2008: What the hell is cloud computing? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FacYAI6DY0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FacYAI6DY0 "The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion driven than women's fashion."
- dkarapetyan 10y ago
  He's not wrong. He brings up several good examples and how "cloud computing" is basically meaningless. He says they're gonna change the marketing to be "cloud computing" friendly since both gmail and salesforce are considered "cloud computing". In that world Oracle DBs are also cloud computing.
  - SEJeff 10y ago
    Oh I don't disagree. Just found it amusing the change of attitude.
    - dkarapetyan 10y ago
      He's not dumb. He's a very competent businessman. He's not gonna let a 2009 Q/A session get in the way of getting more money just so he can be consistent about ragging on "cloud computing".
      - pjlegato 10y ago
        ^^ The difference between management and engineering.
suyash 10y ago
Oracle has brought top talent from Amazon and MS, including Deepak Patil who launched Microsoft Azure: http://agetimes.net/tech/enterprise/this-is-how-oracle-lured-top-flight-programmers-away-from-amazon-and-microsoft-to-build-its-next-big-thing-orcl-amzn/ http://agetimes.net/tech/enterprise/this-is-how-oracle-lured...
- amaks 10y ago
  What a terrible article, and written in such layman language: "it comes as “bare metal,” a attention tenure for servers with no program installed"
  - ahsvduabs 10y ago
    Something about it makes me think it was poorly translated into English.
- nbevans 10y ago
  The first versions of Azure were a disaster. It took a good 4 years for MS to turn it around. So whoever this Deepak Patil fellow is - I wouldn't place him in high regard.
TheRealDunkirk 10y ago
> Software Development Laboratories implemented it and called it Oracle, and in 1979 sold it to the CIA... I've long suspected that Oracle's success was due to becoming the de facto RDBMS for any and all government TLA's. I think this is part of Ellison's legendary arrogance. He knows he has the US government by the short hairs when it comes to IT. I think it also ties well with Sun CEO Scott McNealy's famous, "You have no privacy; get over it," comment. McNealy understood that the CIA (and NSA, FBI, et. al.) were running big data mining operations -- with Oracle, as that was the only game in town, at that point -- on his hardware, but he couldn't just come out and say that.
- gaius 10y ago
  That's not exactly how it happened - Oracle got the CIA as a customer specifically because doing so would let them skip the queue for a new mainframe, for which there was a waiting list. It was what kids these days would call a "growth hack". The original "Oracle" was a scheme for storing data on mylar strips, getting into database game was what kids these days would call a "pivot". (Source: Larry Ellison's bio).
pinaceae 10y ago
Good article, but misses the point on Oracle's risk against AWS. Understandable as Ben is more focused on consumer stuff. Oracle's main money maker is their database product. Running on prem, collecting money through license and maintenance contracts. The more DB installs out there, the better. Salesforce uses Oracle for their backend. But here's the rub - as a SFDC customer, I do not care which DB is running below it. And I don't need an DB in itself anymore. I have my customer data in my CRM, and runs in SFDC datacenters. SFDC is the largest known user of Oracle DB, but it is abstracting away the raw DB product from enterprise users. Like any other SaaS product does. Which means the total number of ORA DBs will shrink, massively. Hence Oracle buying business apps left and right with all that DB money, to augment the sellable stack. Oracle is the elephant graveyeard of enterprise software, in CRM alone they acquired 5-6 different solutions and still sell a bunch of those (Siebel, Oracle CRM, Oracle OnDemand, Fusion, Peoplesoft, etc.). SFDC has announced a big move onto AWS, getting away from running their own datacenters - they're moving upstream, going after the business end users. The underlying tech is a commodity, plumbing, invisible. And what happens to price points of commodities? bye bye fat margin DB business...
- dmourati 10y ago
  Correct. Amazon understand this dynamic and how to play the game. They can take something like Oracle's DB, turn it into a service, and manage it end to end for the customer, and even provide tools to do the migration. This is a straight attack on Oracle. Once in the AWS ecosystem, it becomes easy to follow the logic described in the CIO using MS products in the article. One real risk is lock in. Larry has been harping on this. The counterpoint, of course, is if you are running on the best platform, lock-in is not a problem because you don't want to switch.
  - lightman_group 10y ago
    You mean the best platform running 4 year old hardware? That one.
Roboprog 10y ago
To summarize other comments: If you are running a Fortune 1000 IT group, you'd be a fool not to use Oracle; if you are running a startup, you'd be a fool to use Oracle. It's a pain to create something using Oracle. But it's just there :-(
mwnorman 10y ago
(long time ex-Oracle employee ... take with whatever size grain of salt you wish :-) As the article mentions, Oracle aims primarily at its own installed-base, which limits how much "innovation" they can do .. can't piss-off the paying customers! Their world-view is incredibly narrow ... years ago they discovered that even though they have millions of paying customers, there is a core of only about 5000 customers that they really need to listen to. Oracle should look carefully at IBM's recent moves within the Cloud eco-system: instead of offering the AWS-style "everything-including-the-kitchen-sink", IBM's purchase of 'The Weather Network's big-data division has lead them to offer high-level cloud-APIs for dealing with weather data without the need to put it all together (S3+SQS+DynamoDB+EMR...)
- vgt 10y ago
  Very timely: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/global-historical-daily-weather-data-now-available-in-BigQuery.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/global-historic...
gjkood 10y ago
I guess this is an off topic question, but shouldn't the example of the Hierarchical Database show Customer as the Root and Order as the Parent and Books as the Child? I guess it makes sense if the query is "Show me all the Orders in the system".
gaius 10y ago
However, there were two big limitations with hierarchical databases: first, relationships were pre-determined; what was a parent and what was a child was a decision made before any data was actually entered Well, yes and no. IMS was developed for bill-of-materials processing, which is a kind of thing you do in engineering to keep track of all the parts in your thing you're building. It was first used for the Saturn V rocket. At or at least near the top level you would have things like "a booster" and at the bottom level you would have something like "a bolt", "a nut", "a washer". There was no conceivable case in which you'd want to make a bolt out of boosters so having these relationships pre-determined wasn't actually a "limitation" at all, in the sense that it would never, ever stop a user of the system doing what they needed to do with it. Secondly, queries analyzing the children of different parents are impractical: you would need to traverse the hierarchy to retrieve information for every potential item The sort of query you'd do with this system would be, I want to make a rocket engine, what exactly do I need to order and how many of them, I want to give this piece of the work to this group, do they have all the parts they need in their inventory, and so on and so on. So that's not really an unreasonable sort of query if you are managing an inventory of parts and the processes that make them into ever bigger parts until finally you have your very top level parent "a moon mission".
- theandrewbailey 10y ago
  > There was no conceivable case in which you'd want to make a bolt out of boosters... That won't stop idiots from wanting it to happen.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > IMS was developed for bill-of-materials processing Right, and the restrictions that are appropriate for that domain weren't necessarily appropriate for all the other domains to which it was later applied.
  - gaius 10y ago
    Sure, my point is that RDBMS are not better they are different. Right tool for the job an' all that.
freyr 10y ago
Earlier this week, Oracle had their OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. Thousands of badge-wearing attendees swarmed the city and signs plastered all over declared Oracle "The fastest-growing cloud company." But even the Oracle conference attendees weren't buying it. In a live audience poll held during the live keynote, they voted that Oracle would be unlikely to meet it's cloud goals, and challenged the company's "fastest-growing" claim, giving the title to Amazon instead. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/19/oracle_openworld1/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/19/oracle_openworld1/
- yankoff 10y ago
  Oh, this con.. they blocked Howard st. and majorly have been disrupting traffic downtown the entire week.
hyperpallium 10y ago
What db does the new enterprise use - airbnb, tesla, uber... even google, apple, facebook, amazon? If "software is eating the world", and the new enterprises are software companies (even if they don't sell software), do they write their own custom solution, optimized for their usage patterns? Or do they "grow up" into traditional companies, and rely on outside vendors for their software? I don't think so.
planetjones 10y ago
Are any new companies choosing Oracle products? Or are they really only relying on banks,insurance companies and other blue chips to take up their 'cloud' offerings?
- threeseed 10y ago
  No. And banks, insurance companies etc are moving rapidly to try and get away from Oracle, Teradata etc.
- Karunamon 10y ago
  This is actually a question I never had a good answer for. If I'm a developer, and am going to create a complicated line of business application, are there non-political reasons that I'd want to target Oracle as opposed to, say, Postgres or Maria?
  - gaius 10y ago
    If it has a feature that's cheaper than creating and supporting it yourself. Oracle the database is literally state-of-the-art. Being database-neutral means only using lowest-common-denominator features, which in turn means if you need it, you gotta write it and maintain it.
erpellan 10y ago
I sat next to someone who worked for a well-known company on a plane on the way back from re:invent last year. They were ripping out Oracle and switching to AWS with extreme prejudice after one too many 'guilty-until-proven-innocent' license audits. The days of being able to treat their customers like dirt with impunity are well and truly over.

195 points by craigkerstiens 10y ago

nowey 10y ago

Oracle has IaaS and PaaS solutions now....

colemannerd 10y ago
and the point of the article is that they're light and provide no where near the optionality and features of AWS.
- bduerst 10y ago
  Amazon doesn't really have a PaaS though, right?
  - dmourati 10y ago
    One could argue the entire suite of AWS products make up a PaaS. One could also argue that Elastic Beanstalk is their standalone PaaS offering. https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/ https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/
    - bduerst 10y ago
      Except that isn't really a PaaS when stacked up to the others like App Engine, Heroku, and Azure.
suyash 10y ago
IaaS, PaaS and SaaS - all three layers of the Cloud.

tmptmp 10y ago

I am happy Oracle is losing this battle (edit: or at least feeling the heat), one sort of personal reason is that they have killed/crippled many open source projects. Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something goes wrong. Similar is true for MS too. But if you really want to see your money well spent, Oracle is not at all the way. The recent decision by Yandex to shift from Oracle to Postgres should be seen here. [1] [1] https://www.pgcon.org/2016/schedule/attachments/426_2016.05.19%20Yandex.Mail%20success%20story.pdf https://www.pgcon.org/2016/schedule/attachments/426_2016.05....

b2m9 10y ago
> Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something goes wrong. Well, this can be said for any big business software company. It's the same story with SAP, IBM and friends. Business software is simply not about spending money well.
- strictnein 10y ago
  Business software is about regulatory compliance. That is the baked in value that these behemoths offer.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Big companies are often are complicated mess, and I can emphasize with desire to simplify and streamline operation. There's some benefit with setting your infrastructure in such a way that there's a known party you can pay to fix things quickly, and that you can sue if they can't.
  - AndyNemmity 10y ago
    Often they also like to stay understaffed in IT, so having consistent vendors, and similar systems allows them to keep just a few guys around that have any clue how it works, and supplement with consultants and vendor support.
- AndyNemmity 10y ago
  People say that a lot, but I work with customers all the time who are very happy with their solutions. I don't disagree that some people hate them, or hate this or that ui, but I can think to many companies/interactions with people that love the products. That's never really expressed places like here. It's just "not spending money well", when I think there are legitimate positives to a lot of business software.
  - b2m9 10y ago
    I don't claim that I know the ultimate truth, but I worked for many years for one of those big business software companies. But from my experience, only the people who don't have to interact with such products in any form like it. (Who are often also making the decision to purchase it) It happened only a few times that users of such products (analysts, admins, support, devs, ...) told me that they like this or that. And I still remember each one of those guys and girls. (Weren't that many) I know what those companies charge for their software and maintenance. I've been involved in the development of those products for a couple of years. And my very personal opinion is: they're not worth their money. No matter what a customer tells the press how much easier their business is after purchasing product X from company Y. As I said, it's my personal opinion on that matter.

calpaterson 10y ago

This is a wonderful explanation of the original rationale for relational databases. Periodically poeple re-invent IMS' hierarchical design only to rediscover why relations are important. MongoDB's "document database" is a current example.

js8 10y ago
Actually, I just got a little training on IMS last week, and I have to say, IMS should be reinvented. But not for its weaknesses (hierarchy), but for its strengths (speed). The idea that the application program gets a compiled representation of the exact data pointers that are in the database, and those data pointers optimized for the problem, is very sound, IMHO. IMS is very close to the metal, at the expense of flexibility, and that's how it should be reinvented.
- calpaterson 10y ago
  There is definitely a place for that.
- Jweb_Guru 10y ago
  That's essentially the idea behind Protobuf and friends, is it not? It's not quite as optimized because there's a bounds check, but that's about it (and in many languages you can't get around a NULL or bounds check anyway, and just rely on the branch predictor).
  - js8 10y ago
    Protobuf is not a database. What comes close is DataDraw, but that is an embedded database, not a server.
    - Jweb_Guru 10y ago
      I don't understand your meaning, then... lots of database systems have hardcoded fixed pointer offsets for data structures, and some even compile queries into bytecode with those hardcoded pointer paths (for instance, HyPeR does this using LLVM, and I think some other column-stores do as well). Is your issue that those databases aren't hierarchical? On modern machines, pointer chasing is much slower than predictable sequential memory access, so that model doesn't seem like the performance win it was in the past... maybe I'm wrong.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

gizmodo59 10y ago

A genuine question: If you have worked with any fortune 500/1000 companies (Lets pick non software based companies) either directly or if they are your customers, how many of them use Oracle database or SQL Server? Some of the reasons why this trend WILL continue: 1. Critical software like databases needs support. To the point where there should be someone who can come on premise to fix things. 2. We need to use X because X is used by other big corporations and you never get fired for choosing X. 3. The products (Oracle,MS SQL) are not that bad. (Not sure if there is a better way to put this) I could be wrong, but I can't think of any other important reason. Can anyone pitch in their experience?

pdevr 10y ago
Also, the fact that once you have almost complete monopoly in the enterprise market, only a huge paradigm shift will knock you down. Most of the times, the market leaders are able to adapt, and the clients give them a lot of leeway - not the least because of the points which you pointed out.
godzillabrennus 10y ago
Business managers will get charged with making tech decisions for projects and they will choose brands they trust.
- AndyNemmity 10y ago
  Or with brands that others trust within the same space. Other companies, friends of theirs working in other companies, conferences, etc. It becomes a self perpetuating system.
ako 10y ago
Because it's in the upper right gartner quadrant.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
10y ago

pdevr 10y ago

If you want to know the history of Oracle, "Softwar" is an excellent book. It includes Ellison's notes too, wherever he felt he needed to add them.

geodel 10y ago

Oracle is going to be hobbled by Cloud providers in similar manner as TV networks by Netflix. If Oracle reduce access of its software to Cloud infrastructure providers then they lose potential revenue stream and Cloud providers can start promoting alternatives. On the other hand if cloud providers have access to Oracle products in their cloud then Oracle cloud looks unimpressive to customers and no reason to use Oracle cloud. Like networks learned that must watch shows are decreasing on their networks in last few year Oracle will learn their software is must for decreasing number of customers.

jdcarter 10y ago

What a lot of these analysts overlook is why Oracle is trying to take on Amazon, despite being years late to the party. I believe it's a defensive move: Oracle is seeing long-time customers deploy new applications in AWS, and that customer starts to realize, "hey, that went pretty well, why not move more of my stuff to AWS?" Their Oracle sales rep comes calling, and suddenly a once-reliable customer needs fewer Oracle licenses than last year. Oracle therefore needs an answer to those customers transitioning to the cloud; they want their own cloud to sell. Oracle can undercut Amazon on price--even run their own cloud offerings at a loss for a while--because losing some money on their cloud is better than losing customers from their high-margin products.

toyg 10y ago
> why Oracle is trying to take on Amazon, despite being years late to the party. I believe it's a defensive move Ellison is all about the money. When "the cloud" started, he quietly bankrolled a bunch of companies spearheading the space, so he didn't have to risk his cash-cow. Once the space was proven, he's steered the whole company - and he didn't do it yesterday, he's done it about 6 years ago. You're seeing results today because Oracle is large, it takes a while to release stuff that has almost been rewritten from scratch to fit the new paradigm, and it takes even more to sell it to Oracle's very conservative userbase. If it succeeds, the subscription model will make Oracle even more money than before. However, they are effectively rewriting from scratch a large number of their products; this is why they are very limited. It will take another 5 years before they can reach feature-parity with on-premise solutions, assuming on-prem doesn't get anything new in the meantime. Performance is also pretty dismal for some cloud products at the moment.
- jdcarter 10y ago
  Oracle selling higher-end products as a service makes total sense, and I agree, the subscription model has potential to make them a good deal of money. What I'm getting at, however, is why are they so aggressively taking on Amazon in the IaaS space? That's the part which doesn't make sense on the surface--they show up late and then attempt to compete on price. Since when has Oracle competed on price? The conclusion I come to is that Amazon must be eating away at their customer base. Once a customer starts to move some of their IT into AWS, and it goes well, that puts Oracle on the defensive--not a spot they like to be in. I doubt Oracle really wants to be in the IaaS business just for the sake of IaaS. They want to focus on higher-margin services. The IaaS part must be a defensive move to keep customers away from AWS and within the Oracle ecosystem.

SEJeff 10y ago

Quote Larry Ellison in 2008: What the hell is cloud computing? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FacYAI6DY0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FacYAI6DY0 "The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion driven than women's fashion."

dkarapetyan 10y ago
He's not wrong. He brings up several good examples and how "cloud computing" is basically meaningless. He says they're gonna change the marketing to be "cloud computing" friendly since both gmail and salesforce are considered "cloud computing". In that world Oracle DBs are also cloud computing.
- SEJeff 10y ago
  Oh I don't disagree. Just found it amusing the change of attitude.
  - dkarapetyan 10y ago
    He's not dumb. He's a very competent businessman. He's not gonna let a 2009 Q/A session get in the way of getting more money just so he can be consistent about ragging on "cloud computing".
    - pjlegato 10y ago
      ^^ The difference between management and engineering.

suyash 10y ago

Oracle has brought top talent from Amazon and MS, including Deepak Patil who launched Microsoft Azure: http://agetimes.net/tech/enterprise/this-is-how-oracle-lured-top-flight-programmers-away-from-amazon-and-microsoft-to-build-its-next-big-thing-orcl-amzn/ http://agetimes.net/tech/enterprise/this-is-how-oracle-lured...

amaks 10y ago
What a terrible article, and written in such layman language: "it comes as “bare metal,” a attention tenure for servers with no program installed"
- ahsvduabs 10y ago
  Something about it makes me think it was poorly translated into English.
nbevans 10y ago
The first versions of Azure were a disaster. It took a good 4 years for MS to turn it around. So whoever this Deepak Patil fellow is - I wouldn't place him in high regard.

TheRealDunkirk 10y ago

> Software Development Laboratories implemented it and called it Oracle, and in 1979 sold it to the CIA... I've long suspected that Oracle's success was due to becoming the de facto RDBMS for any and all government TLA's. I think this is part of Ellison's legendary arrogance. He knows he has the US government by the short hairs when it comes to IT. I think it also ties well with Sun CEO Scott McNealy's famous, "You have no privacy; get over it," comment. McNealy understood that the CIA (and NSA, FBI, et. al.) were running big data mining operations -- with Oracle, as that was the only game in town, at that point -- on his hardware, but he couldn't just come out and say that.

gaius 10y ago
That's not exactly how it happened - Oracle got the CIA as a customer specifically because doing so would let them skip the queue for a new mainframe, for which there was a waiting list. It was what kids these days would call a "growth hack". The original "Oracle" was a scheme for storing data on mylar strips, getting into database game was what kids these days would call a "pivot". (Source: Larry Ellison's bio).

pinaceae 10y ago

Good article, but misses the point on Oracle's risk against AWS. Understandable as Ben is more focused on consumer stuff. Oracle's main money maker is their database product. Running on prem, collecting money through license and maintenance contracts. The more DB installs out there, the better. Salesforce uses Oracle for their backend. But here's the rub - as a SFDC customer, I do not care which DB is running below it. And I don't need an DB in itself anymore. I have my customer data in my CRM, and runs in SFDC datacenters. SFDC is the largest known user of Oracle DB, but it is abstracting away the raw DB product from enterprise users. Like any other SaaS product does. Which means the total number of ORA DBs will shrink, massively. Hence Oracle buying business apps left and right with all that DB money, to augment the sellable stack. Oracle is the elephant graveyeard of enterprise software, in CRM alone they acquired 5-6 different solutions and still sell a bunch of those (Siebel, Oracle CRM, Oracle OnDemand, Fusion, Peoplesoft, etc.). SFDC has announced a big move onto AWS, getting away from running their own datacenters - they're moving upstream, going after the business end users. The underlying tech is a commodity, plumbing, invisible. And what happens to price points of commodities? bye bye fat margin DB business...

dmourati 10y ago
Correct. Amazon understand this dynamic and how to play the game. They can take something like Oracle's DB, turn it into a service, and manage it end to end for the customer, and even provide tools to do the migration. This is a straight attack on Oracle. Once in the AWS ecosystem, it becomes easy to follow the logic described in the CIO using MS products in the article. One real risk is lock in. Larry has been harping on this. The counterpoint, of course, is if you are running on the best platform, lock-in is not a problem because you don't want to switch.
- lightman_group 10y ago
  You mean the best platform running 4 year old hardware? That one.

Roboprog 10y ago

To summarize other comments: If you are running a Fortune 1000 IT group, you'd be a fool not to use Oracle; if you are running a startup, you'd be a fool to use Oracle. It's a pain to create something using Oracle. But it's just there :-(

mwnorman 10y ago

(long time ex-Oracle employee ... take with whatever size grain of salt you wish :-) As the article mentions, Oracle aims primarily at its own installed-base, which limits how much "innovation" they can do .. can't piss-off the paying customers! Their world-view is incredibly narrow ... years ago they discovered that even though they have millions of paying customers, there is a core of only about 5000 customers that they really need to listen to. Oracle should look carefully at IBM's recent moves within the Cloud eco-system: instead of offering the AWS-style "everything-including-the-kitchen-sink", IBM's purchase of 'The Weather Network's big-data division has lead them to offer high-level cloud-APIs for dealing with weather data without the need to put it all together (S3+SQS+DynamoDB+EMR...)

vgt 10y ago
Very timely: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/global-historical-daily-weather-data-now-available-in-BigQuery.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/global-historic...

gjkood 10y ago

I guess this is an off topic question, but shouldn't the example of the Hierarchical Database show Customer as the Root and Order as the Parent and Books as the Child? I guess it makes sense if the query is "Show me all the Orders in the system".

gaius 10y ago

However, there were two big limitations with hierarchical databases: first, relationships were pre-determined; what was a parent and what was a child was a decision made before any data was actually entered Well, yes and no. IMS was developed for bill-of-materials processing, which is a kind of thing you do in engineering to keep track of all the parts in your thing you're building. It was first used for the Saturn V rocket. At or at least near the top level you would have things like "a booster" and at the bottom level you would have something like "a bolt", "a nut", "a washer". There was no conceivable case in which you'd want to make a bolt out of boosters so having these relationships pre-determined wasn't actually a "limitation" at all, in the sense that it would never, ever stop a user of the system doing what they needed to do with it. Secondly, queries analyzing the children of different parents are impractical: you would need to traverse the hierarchy to retrieve information for every potential item The sort of query you'd do with this system would be, I want to make a rocket engine, what exactly do I need to order and how many of them, I want to give this piece of the work to this group, do they have all the parts they need in their inventory, and so on and so on. So that's not really an unreasonable sort of query if you are managing an inventory of parts and the processes that make them into ever bigger parts until finally you have your very top level parent "a moon mission".

theandrewbailey 10y ago
> There was no conceivable case in which you'd want to make a bolt out of boosters... That won't stop idiots from wanting it to happen.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> IMS was developed for bill-of-materials processing Right, and the restrictions that are appropriate for that domain weren't necessarily appropriate for all the other domains to which it was later applied.
- gaius 10y ago
  Sure, my point is that RDBMS are not better they are different. Right tool for the job an' all that.

freyr 10y ago

Earlier this week, Oracle had their OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. Thousands of badge-wearing attendees swarmed the city and signs plastered all over declared Oracle "The fastest-growing cloud company." But even the Oracle conference attendees weren't buying it. In a live audience poll held during the live keynote, they voted that Oracle would be unlikely to meet it's cloud goals, and challenged the company's "fastest-growing" claim, giving the title to Amazon instead. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/19/oracle_openworld1/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/19/oracle_openworld1/

yankoff 10y ago
Oh, this con.. they blocked Howard st. and majorly have been disrupting traffic downtown the entire week.

hyperpallium 10y ago

What db does the new enterprise use - airbnb, tesla, uber... even google, apple, facebook, amazon? If "software is eating the world", and the new enterprises are software companies (even if they don't sell software), do they write their own custom solution, optimized for their usage patterns? Or do they "grow up" into traditional companies, and rely on outside vendors for their software? I don't think so.

planetjones 10y ago

Are any new companies choosing Oracle products? Or are they really only relying on banks,insurance companies and other blue chips to take up their 'cloud' offerings?

threeseed 10y ago
No. And banks, insurance companies etc are moving rapidly to try and get away from Oracle, Teradata etc.
Karunamon 10y ago
This is actually a question I never had a good answer for. If I'm a developer, and am going to create a complicated line of business application, are there non-political reasons that I'd want to target Oracle as opposed to, say, Postgres or Maria?
- gaius 10y ago
  If it has a feature that's cheaper than creating and supporting it yourself. Oracle the database is literally state-of-the-art. Being database-neutral means only using lowest-common-denominator features, which in turn means if you need it, you gotta write it and maintain it.

erpellan 10y ago

I sat next to someone who worked for a well-known company on a plane on the way back from re:invent last year. They were ripping out Oracle and switching to AWS with extreme prejudice after one too many 'guilty-until-proven-innocent' license audits. The days of being able to treat their customers like dirt with impunity are well and truly over.