Probing the far reaches of the “better late than never” category, AWS has launched an “Interconnect-multicloud” service four years after Oracle’s initial interconnect deal with Microsoft and three years after Larry Ellison engineered the market-shaking Oracle Multicloud Miracle.
In a fairly low-key announcement, AWS cited Google Cloud as its official launch partner, with expectations that Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will be switched on sometime later this year. (Does that signal “urgency” to you? Me neither.)
So, about that “Oracle Leads, AWS Follows” thing in the headline: while I’m very happy to give relevant props to AWS for taking this step to make life better for not only its customers but also those of the other hyperscalers, the timetable represents yet another indication of how the former “king of the cloud” has settled comfortably into the role of court follower.
But heck — while AWS richly deserves the “follower” tag, it can’t even qualify for “fast follower” on its nametag because its launch comes at least three years — three years! — after Ellison and Oracle began tearing down the walled gardens isolating the various hyperscalers’ clouds and vastly increasing the freedom of choice for customers.
I don’t doubt that the AWS team and its many supporters can offer up a raft of reasons for why the company — now #7 on the Cloud Wars Top 10, while Oracle is #2 — needed three whole years to duplicate what Oracle did first with Microsoft, then with Google Cloud, and finally with AWS. And as noted above, we can rationalize this move by saying “better late than never,” which in the world-shaping and blazingly fast Cloud Wars packs all the punch of a participation trophy.
The Oracle-Microsoft multicloud agreement was so momentous that in Oct. 2023, Ellison made his first trip ever to the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., to do a fireside chat with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about the benefits the partnership would provide for customers.
A few weeks later on Microsoft’s quarterly earnings call, Nadella was asked what factors were behind the higher-than-expected growth numbers for Azure. The very first driver he cited was the “huge unlock” among customers who wanted to run the Oracle Database in the Azure cloud.
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A year later, Google CEO appeared at Oracle AI World by video for a conversation with Ellison about the newly hatched Oracle-Google Cloud multicloud partnership, and at the same event AWS CEO Matt Garman sat down five feet away from Ellison in front of 20,000 people to discuss the significance of the Oracle-AWS multicloud pact (for more on that, please see my brief video headlined “Larry Ellison Brings Peace to the Cloud Wars!“).
On Oracle’s part, that was breakthrough leadership in three dimensions:
- new technologies powerful enough and small enough to fit into the data centers of its rivals;
- a new go-to-market strategy that has resulted in a mind-numbing outcome wherein the sales teams of Microsoft, Google Cloud, and AWS are selling the Oracle Database to their customers; and
- new leadership vision that embraces the idea of working with competitors to deliver advanced business outcomes to customers that no hyperscaler could deliver individually.
By contrast, check out the humdrum AWS press release/blog post announcing the AWS Interconnect – multicloud: a few hundred uninspired and uninspiring words so bland that AWS didn’t even bother to include a comment from an executive or a customer to offer some context on why anyone should care. Here’s the spiciest excerpt:
Previously, when interconnecting workloads across multiple cloud providers, customers had to go the route of a ‘do-it-yourself’ multicloud approach, leading to complexities of managing global multi-layered networks at scale. AWS Interconnect – multicloud is the first purpose-built product of its kind and a new way of how clouds connect and talk to each other. Simplifying connectivity into AWS, Interconnect – multicloud enables customers to quickly establish private, secure, high-speed network connections with dedicated bandwidth and built-in resiliency between their Amazon VPCs and other cloud environments.
I know, I know: be still my beating heart and all that!!
Final Thought
As I said above, good for AWS for doing this because it might make life better for some customers. But AWS’s timing — better yet, its absence of urgency — and its apparent admission by default that this is more of a check-the-box feature than a breakthrough business innovation underscore the fact that AWS has learned how to be an unintrusive and fairly predictable follower.
And hey, every market needs some of those, right?
But “king of the cloud”? That tired tag is as out of date as this latest AWS announcement.
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