Larry Ellison’s Trojan Horse: Oracle Exadata in 86% of Fortune Global 100

Oracle’s recent disclosure that its Exadata Database Machine is running within 86 of the world’s largest corporations takes on huge significance now that the most-advanced version of Exadata is available in the cloud in every flavor a customer might want.

If even half of those 86 corporations in the Fortune Global 100 decide to migrate those Exadata on-premises systems to this new top-of-the-line Exadata Cloud Service, that would represent a huge boost for Oracle’s rising fortunes in the cloud. 

(On my Cloud Wars Top 10 weekly rankings, Oracle is #6.)

In particular, it would provide additional real-world evidence that OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure)—Larry Ellison’s #1 priority—has become a very serious player in the IaaS world, albeit still being far behind leaders Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

And with this latest cloud-native iteration of Exadata, Oracle is emphasizing that its top-of-the-line database platform can handle the largest and most-challenging database workloads that any customer might have.

In rolling out the Exadata Cloud Service X8M last week, Oracle took direct aim at rival Amazon in offering side-by-side comparisons of performance, scale and cost. In addition, this slide from the Oracle presentation revealed not only the 86% penetration among the Fortune Global 100 but also the logos of many of the large companies running the optimized database platform.

In its press release describing its latest Exadata Cloud Service, Oracle focused on the accelerating shift of mission-critical workloads to the cloud and the performance advantages it says Exadata can deliver versus Amazon’s various database offerings.

Because as large corporations accelerate their migration of mission-critical workloads to the cloud, they are finding that “many cloud databases have performance, availability and scaling limitations,” said Oracle executive vice president Juan Loaiza, who heads up the company’s increasingly vital mission-critical database technologies. 

With the new Exadata cloud service, Loaiza said in a press release, those limitations are gone because the X8M allows businesses to run “the largest and most compute-intensive and memory-intensive workloads…dramatically” faster and at less  expensively than Amazon or any other cloud provider.

Among the claims of superiority over Amazon made by Loaiza and Oracle:

• “Exadata Cloud Service X8M supports relational databases that are 20X bigger than possible to run on AWS today with RDS or Aurora—and bests both AWS RDS and Aurora by 25 times in CPU scaling.”
• “AWS lacks true online elasticity as AWS RDS offers no scale-out capabilities; Aurora DB instance scaling ‘will have an availability impact,’ according to Amazon.”
• “None of these AWS database services offer true online patching and maintenance like Exadata Cloud Service X8M.”

No doubt, those are confident words from Oracle. But Oracle’s going to need to match that lofty rhetoric about performance capabilities with big-time revenue commitments from customers because Amazon’s market-share lead over Oracle is overwhelming.

And for several years, we’ve all heard many times from Oracle about how it’s going to catch Amazon and beat Amazon—and nothing even remotely of the sort has happened. 

But Oracle now appears to have the technology and vision to give corporate customers a very serious—and possibly superior—alternative to AWS. That’s why I highlighted that 86% incumbency position among 100 of the world’s largest corporations. 

If, as those companies begin to move vital workloads to the cloud, they decide to go with market leaders Amazon, Microsoft or Google, then Oracle’s path to viability in cloud infrastructure looks like it might lead nowhere.

But—if a big chunk of those 86 corporations decide to ride Exadata and Oracle into the cloud with X8M and OCI, then the 3-way horserace atop the massive cloud infrastructure will gain a fourth very serious competitor.

Disclosure: at the time of this writing, Oracle and Google Cloud were among the many clients of Cloud Wars Media LLC and/or Evans Strategic Communications LLC.

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