A strong case can be made that
More than 10,000 paying customers are using the Oracle Cloud, and that extends out to 25,000,000 million individual users. Can any other IT vendor that claims to be a serious cloud-computing player—
Here's a quick quiz:
- Public cloud, private clouds, and hybrid clouds: how many companies other than Oracle offer that full range of cloud deployment models?
- Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service: how many companies other than Oracle offer that full range of cloud services?
- A complete suite of cloud applications for all facets of your enterprise with advanced capabilities for social, BI, and mobile engineered in from the ground up: how many companies other than Oracle offer that full range of cloud applications and features?
For Oracle, the move into the cloud isn’t new, it isn’t trendy, and it isn’t tentative—CEO Larry Ellison began an aggressive move into the cloud 8 years ago with the Fusion Applications megaproject, which would allow customers to run Fusion apps either on-premise or in the cloud, interchangeably, with the same code base.
Any other IT companies out there able to give customers such full and open choice?
On top of that massive R&D commitment over the past several years, Oracle has also invested significantly in its cloud solutions and strategy during that time by acquiring a number of SaaS companies now being integrated with Oracle Cloud.
In that context of Oracle’s unquestioned leadership in the cloud-computing field, I’m starting to feel sorry for some of the deeply committed Oracle-haters in the media and punditry class who, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, continue to try to belittle or marginalize Oracle’s cloud strategy and solutions, and continue to ignore the the rapidly growing number of customers choosing to run significant chunks of their business on Oracle’s cloud products.
I feel bad for them because they’re completely missing one heck of a revolution in the world of cloud computing, engineered systems, customer choice, simplified IT, and the profound impact all of those are having on business customers across the globe.
And they’re missing that revolution because they’re unwilling to step back and see the world for what it is becoming, and because they are choosing for whatever reason to cling to outdated and deeply flawed perceptions of Oracle, its business model, and its capabilities.
As a result, some commentators continue to try to push the theme—in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that Oracle was late to the cloud, or is hedging its bets in the cloud, or is trying to fool customers with faux cloud, or that Larry Ellison somehow doesn’t understand the cloud or the enormous ramifications it’ll have on the tech business. (For a deeper look inside those fantasies, please check out Larry Ellison Doesn't Get the Cloud: The Dumbest Idea of 2013.)
In our turbulent and relentlessly changing world, that’s the wrong way to go for individuals ostensibly responsible for chronicling those changes and giving readers a look over the horizon.
Back in 1946, the head of the 20th Century Fox movie studio, Darryl F. Zanuck, offered this perspective on a new technology that some thought might turn his industry upside-down: “Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”
As a movie mogul whose business was predicated on getting people out of their homes and into theaters, Zanuck clearly had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and downplaying the significance of any innovation that didn’t advance the goals of his movie studio. But regardless of his rationale, Zanuck was profoundly mistaken on the significance and impact of television.
And I can’t help but think that some of today’s commentators on the IT business have fallen victim to a comparable sort of reality-distortion field that seems to frame their view of what Oracle’s doing in the dynamic and high-value world of cloud computing.
Now, I’m fully aware that some people just don’t like Oracle—and that’s fine. After all, some people don’t like kittens, or orange juice, or baseball—and that’s why, as a dear friend liked to say, God made chocolate and vanilla.
But when the Oracle Cloud serves 10,000 paying customers and is used by more than 25,000,000 people, I have to wonder about the thinking behind a recent headline on a well-respected media site that says, “Sorry, Larry, But Oracle’s Cloud BS Is Wearing Thin.” Here's why:
The article under that claim leans heavily on comments from another cloud-computing vendor who criticizes Oracle’s new on-premise Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution, but the person who wrote that article—and, I believe, the headline—never offers Oracle a chance to tell its side of the story.
In an article laden with ad hominem swipes at Oracle’s CEO, why not give Oracle a chance to respond? What was the reporter afraid of learning about Oracle and its new on-premise IaaS solution?
So since Oracle wasn’t given a chance to tell our side of the story, here are a few quick counterpoints to the “Cloud BS” claim:
1) As noted above, no other IT vendor offers as broad a range of cloud solutions as Oracle does: public clouds, private clouds and hybrid clouds; and, a full range of enterprise-level IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS solutions, all fully compatible with Oracle’s on-premises solutions.
2) The recent announcement of Oracle IaaS for on-premise use is just one element within a much broader portfolio of cloud offerings. It’s targeted specifically at a segment of customers with specific requirements: they want cloud capabilities such as monthly pricing and on-demand elastic computing capacity, but they also want that solution to be physically located on their premises and in the form of a private cloud. That’s why Oracle configured the solution that way, and it makes no sense for that sort of solution to be compared—as it was in the article—to public-cloud offerings not available as an on-premise solution. Had the reporter only asked, we would have been happy to explain.
3) The reason Oracle offers such a wide range of cloud solutions is because customers have a wide range of needs requiring far more than a one-size-fits-all approach. A core element within Oracle’s cloud strategy is giving customers a range of choices: cloud or on-premise or both; private cloud or public cloud or both; engineered-systems infrastructure or not; etc. For whatever reason, none of that was ever mentioned in the “Cloud BS” article—I guess it would have been less titillating to report the facts.
But don’t take my word for it—here’s an excerpt from an InformationWeek article about the new Oracle IaaS solution that was written by Charles Babcock:
Unlike Amazon or Rackspace IaaS, the Oracle products, announced Jan. 15, get installed on the customer's premises and are operated by the customer.
But Oracle will charge for the package by monthly subscription, instead of the usual lifetime license. Oracle will also take responsibility for integrating and configuring the package's elements, making them easier to deploy on a customer's premises. And it will shift what had been a customer's capital expense into a monthly operating expense.
The products involved are the already familiar engineered appliances Exadata Database Machine, Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Exalytics In-Memory Machine, Sun ZFS Storage Appliance and the SPARC SuperCluster, an appliance running Solaris 11 on up to 16 SPARC processors with eight cores each. Oracle in effect has given the "infrastructure" name, often applied elsewhere to plain vanilla x86 servers and storage, to a set of its highly engineered appliances.
Oracle IaaS will also offer the option of an elastic compute capacity as a service, called Capacity on Demand. That's another way Oracle IaaS differs from its standard packaged software product. It includes the option of elastic CPU scaling, or compute capacity on demand, which regular, sold-by-the-CPU packages wouldn't allow. If a customer decides to invoke compute capacity on demand, there is an extra service charge for that month. For retailers, that would be a valuable option in the months of November and December, during peak shopping periods. But there is no charge in months when it is not invoked.
Since I have quoted Babcock’s work here, let me mention also that a few years ago, he quite literally wrote the book on cloud computing: Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution.
And to those commentators out there who would prefer chewing an arm off rather than giving Oracle its due, remember one thing: your readers are a lot smarter than you apparently think they are.
RECOMMENDED READING FROM ORACLEVOICE:
Oracle Cloud Tops 10,000 Customers and 25 Million Users
Oracle Disrupts Cloud Industry with End-to-End Approach
Oracle Execs Tell Wall Street: We Got the Cloud
Larry Ellison Doesn't Get the Cloud: The Dumbest Idea of 2013
Oracle's Secret Sauce: Why Exadata Is Rocking the Tech Industry
Cloud Industry Rockets Toward $100 Billion; McKinsey Bullish
The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2013 (item #6: “Upgrade ‘Cloud Strategy’ to ‘Business Transformation Enabled by the Cloud’ ”)
Dear CIO: Is The Time Bomb In Your IT Budget About To Explode? (cloud can be primary defusing agent)
Why Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Is So Bullish on Sun Hardware (engineered systems are optimal infrastructure for cloud)
The Strategic CIO Agenda 2013: Strategies, Priorities, and Career-Killers
The Biggest Big-Data Opportunities: How to Choose the Right One
Steve Jobs, The $60 Light Bulb, And The Future Of Technology
