Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily news and commentary show, hosted by Cloud Wars Founder Bob Evans. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the Cloud.
In this Cloud Wars Minute, Bob revisits the Cloud Wars Top 10 rankings as Oracle has been making moves that might push it up the ranks past Amazon’s AWS.
This episode is sponsored by Acceleration Economy’s “Cloud Wars Top 10 Course,” which explains how Bob Evans builds and updates the Cloud Wars Top 10 ranking, as well as how C-suite executives use the list to inform strategic cloud purchase decisions. The course is available today.
Highlights
00:33 — Bob reviews the Cloud Wars Top 10 rankings as #4 Oracle might just be overtaking #3 AWS. A contributing factor involves how the companies are ranked on the Cloud Wars Top 10; a big part is growth rates.
01:17 — Because growth rates are a major part, Bob compares growth rates from the past 12 months, comparing rates from Q1 last year to this year:
| Company | Revenue | Growth Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft | $28.5B | 32% to 22% |
| $7.45B | 44% to 28% | |
| Amazon | $21.4B | 37% to 16% |
| Oracle | $4.4B | 19% to 54% |
01:54 — Oracle nearly tripled its growth rate. Bob suggests that this implies there’s a “rise of the software-oriented innovation cloud overtaking, in significance, the traditional infrastructure-oriented efficiency clouds.”
02:41 — There’s no doubt AWS is going to be a huge force in the business for a long time to come. When Bob started the Cloud Wars Top 10 around six years ago, AWS was #1 until Microsoft claimed the top ranking a couple of years later. About six weeks ago, Google Cloud moved up to #2 over AWS because of its “deep, intense business transformation engagements with customers” as well as “the huge move it’s making in generative AI.”
03:33 — Customers are looking for not only the efficiency of the traditional cloud but also moving forward into the realm of innovation and growth, becoming a full-scale data-powered digital business. “This is where the rise of the innovation cloud surrounded so much by software is happening,” Bob says.
03:57 — Bob believes Oracle has a good chance of overtaking AWS because of its expertise in software, from cloud-native databases to industry-specific applications to analytics to infusing artificial intelligence (AI) into applications and more.
04:21 — The acquisition of Cerner contributed to Oracle’s growth. Bob credits the “masterful job” of CEO Safra Catz in describing how Oracle’s organic cloud business will grow probably more than 30% over the next couple of years.
05:05 — Bob goes more into detail on this growth in his analysis coming later today.
05:44 — If AWS is unable to turn around this “precipitous slide” in its growth rate and Oracle continues in the direction it’s heading, Bob projects that we’ll see more big changes in the Cloud Wars Top 10 rankings.
