Why is Oracle acting like a Public Cloud?
A dreary and overcast day it truly was in 2010, with bursts of light showers every now and then. In what seemed like a pointless wait till eternity for clear skies, I made a dash in the pouring rain to the nearest shelter in the sprawled out tech campus. Dripping wet from head to toe, I looked around, the other folks taking shelter were all from one team — all over-qualified, respected and certified Oracle DBA’s. They were also some of the highest paid folks in the firm.
They were also the busiest, whether it was expanding table spaces, planning for capacity expansions or backing up data, they always seemed to have their finger in every pie as far as data was concerned in the enterprise. This was before the arrival of Big Data
Just a decade later and so much has changed. The rise of big data and its insatiable demand saw IT professionals rush to augment their skill sets with the latest cutting edge tech. Hoards of them were seen attending almost every Technology Conference they could get tickets for — right from AWS re:Invent, Google Next, Strata Data Conference and Data Natives, to mention a few (apart from the scores of other technical conferences that happen regularly now). One big name that you‘d barely hear mentioned of in any of these Conferences these days is Oracle — unless of course its the Oracle World Conference.
This is indeed quite surprising, given the fact that Oracle, seemed to be one step ahead when it launched its own Oracle Autonomous Database back in 2018 with much fanfare before any of this “As a Service” cult had taken off. However with the spate of disruptions that happened rapidly over the last 10 years, was this really what the market wanted?
Take for example the latest Gartner Report on Cloud Infrastructure(below) and Platform services in 2021. It’s a small consolation that Oracle is still ahead of IBM (a laggard in this space) and behind in the challengers quadrant trailing even Alibaba despite all the issues they’ve been having as of late.
In fact, Oracle should have known better than to name their Public Cloud — OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure), given the fact that almost all their data center infrastructure is leased to them by either Digital Reality / Equinox.
However, this is hardly a problem.
Logging on to the OCI service, the first thing that hits you is their flagship — Oracle Autonomous DB and MySQL. These 2 products occupy prime space on their front page. Also present are some of their equally popular products such as Golden Gate and Exadata along with some thrown-in services which very few people (apart from their loyal customers) knew ever existed — Oracle NoSQL, Oracle Analytics Cloud, etc..
The OCI Marketplace (where other vendors showcase their wares) is devoid of popular databases such as Postgres. Cloud Native Platforms which are making waves globally such as Snowflake & Databricks are not listed on the menu here. This whole endeavor makes it seem that OCI is one Big Public Relations exercise for the universe of all Oracle Products, and a seemingly expensive one too.
A bigger miss is that Oracle is presently not available on any of the 3 big public clouds — AWS, Azure and Google. This has left a huge opportunity on the table for the other cloud providers. In fact, the trio — AWS, Azure and Google already have Oracle to Postgres migration offerings which they are promoting quite aggressively. The fact that some of them provide this service for free is a clear indication of them trying to chip away at Oracle’s prized enterprise customer base.
Oracle could have instead positioned it’s Private Cloud for its choicest customers (the ones who demand the whole suite of their products from Golden Gate to Exadata) while deploying its other more popular offerings (Oracle Autonomous Database) natively on the Marketplaces of the 3 main Cloud providers. The absence of Oracle on the 3 public clouds has clearly created a void for its smaller customers who prefer migration to the safety of the big 3. Does Oracle know the Opportunity cost of this?
Howbeit, as of 2021, Oracle is slowly beginning to see some traction on its OCI platform with the acquisition of customers such as Zoom, Mazda, Experien, etc. due to a Rewards program that offers customers discounts to migrate to OCI. Regardless of this, as far as public cloud adoption goes — OCI is still leagues behind the big 3.
The DBA’s in the shelter of the campus I met years ago have all moved on. Some of them are now running IT departments where managing databases is not what it used to be — or in the words of one of them “supposedly doesn’t need DBA’s”.
