After almost 50 years of being the tech industry’s unrivaled master of the long game, Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison is proposing a bet so audacious that he’s likely to get some takers despite the very clear historical record showing quite clearly that betting against him is a losing proposition.
On Oracle’s recent fiscal-Q4 earnings call, Ellison proclaimed the following:
- Oracle will be the #1 cloud-database company;
- Oracle will be the #1 cloud applications company; and
- Oracle will be “the #1 builder and operator of cloud-infrastructure data centers,” ultimately building and operating more of those 21st-century factories “than all of our cloud-infrastructure competitors combined.”
Amid a cohort of world-class competitors led by Microsoft, Google Cloud, Amazon, SAP, and Salesforce — not to mention a couple of hundred new-tech database vendors representing the latest wave of so-called “Oracle killers” that, ultimately, rarely even lay a glove on Oracle — Ellison and his company seem to have finally hit the overreach button with all that ambition.
Right?
Because, well, nobody can be #1 in each of those very different categories, right? Heck, it would be a monumental feat for Oracle to reach #1 in just two of those three categories — so maybe Ellison should just settle for that.
Right?
Well, that’s the conventional outlook.
And that’s how 99% of the world would view the situation here in the hypercompetitive Cloud Wars, populated by many of the world’s biggest, wealthiest, most-powerful, and most technologically advanced businesses.
But that is absolutely, positively not how Larry Ellison sees it.
So let’s look at that bet he’s making across the three different layers of the cloud swept up in his mega-wager.
1. Being #1 in cloud databases. “Most of the world’s most valuable data is stored in an Oracle database,” Ellison said on the call, “and all of those databases are moving to the cloud — Oracle’s cloud, Microsoft’s Azure cloud, Amazon’s cloud, or Google’s cloud — and Oracle runs everywhere.”
And that multicloud approach is proving to be hugely popular among customers, Ellison said, with sequential quarter-to-quarter revenue growing 115% as customers deploy in the clouds of their choice:
“We’re seeing huge growth in MultiCloud from the data centers we’ve already built…. But the future growth rate in MultiCloud is astonishing. In other words, our database is now moving very rapidly to the cloud because of a few reasons: Because the database has now all these AI capabilities, and also because quite frankly now people can get it in whatever cloud they want. If you’re dedicated to using Microsoft Azure, you can get the fully capable Oracle Database and Microsoft Azure with all of our fanciest features, including the new AI features. You can get [Oracle Database] at Google. You can get it at Amazon,and you can get it at the Oracle Cloud.
“It’s all the same in every cloud, and that’s given our customers a lot of comfort that Oracle is not only where they store all of their current data and that they want to keep using the Oracle Database and expand their use of the Oracle Database and move all of that data to the cloud as quickly as they can, but also they’re now able to do it in the cloud of their choosing.”
And the newest version of the Oracle Database — called Oracle 23ai — is specifically designed to meet the requirements of AI-focused customers. Ellison described Oracle 23ai as an “AI Data Platform, the only database that can make all of the customer’s data immediately available to all of the popular AI large language models, while maintaining complete data privacy for the customer.”
So as Ellison sees it, “As use of AI increases, so will Oracle’s database market share.”
Bob’s take: I am 100% confident Ellison and Oracle will reach Ellison’s goal of being the #1 provider of cloud databases. The market for cloud databases is enormous, and no doubt many of those so-called “Oracle killer” startups and high-growth youngsters like MongoDB and Cockroach and others will do very well without ever doing much to seriously threaten Oracle’s mortality. But the large-scale forces Ellison describes above are far bigger and more powerful and more comprehensive than the collective impact of the challengers, as shown in some database growth and revenue figures from CEO Safra Catz:
- Cloud database services rose 31% with an annual run rate of $2.6 billion;
- Autonomous Database consumption revenue jumped 47%, “as on-premise databases migrate to the cloud, either on OCI directly or through our Database@Cloud services” with Azure, Google, and AWS.
Catz is banking on cloud-database revenues to become “the third driver of revenue growth, alongside OCI and strategic SaaS.” Oracle now offers its multi-cloud Database@Cloud services in 23 regions and is expanding that to 47 additional regions, Catz said.
https://cloudwars.com/cloud/larry-ellison-declares-oracle-will-be-1-in-cloud-databases-apps-and-ai-data-centers/
