Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I explore Larry Ellison’s vision for breaking down barriers between different cloud providers, focusing on the unprecedented multi-cloud deals and hinting at a future where applications, like infrastructure, can operate seamlessly across platforms.
Highlights
00:15 — One of the ways that Larry Ellison is helping to create a very different world is his crusade to tear down these walled gardens around different clouds and the infrastructure that’s used there. And I think when I referred to this, that was Act One. I think Ellison’s got Act Two, another multi-cloud miracle coming, and it’s going to involve not infrastructure, but applications.
01:00 — Recently, all three of the other big hyperscalers — Microsoft, Google, and AWS — all agreed to do multi-cloud infrastructure deals with Oracle. I give Ellison a great deal of credit for pushing on this and having the persuasion and the intellectual heft to get this through. The big point about this is that everybody wins.
01:49 — Applications cloud collaboration could involve Salesforce, Workday, Oracle, and possibly SAP. In Ellison’s slide at his CloudWorld keynotes, he showed infrastructure with a bullet point listing Oracle, Microsoft, Google Cloud, and AWS—they’ve done that. Below that, he said “applications,” and it had Oracle, Salesforce, Workday. I believe Ellison was drawing a parallel there.
02:40 — The second point was in that keynote with AWS CEO Matt Garman joining Ellison on stage. They had another guest, the State Street Bank CTO. He was excited about the multi-cloud deal, emphasizing that it needs its data and apps closer to customers. In his keynote, Ellison said soon there will be an applications cloud, so you can mix and match — a strong hint in this multi-cloud direction.
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03:25 — NetSuite and Salesforce are actually doing this. They had a big announcement about a new set of connectors that allow the customers of NetSuite and Salesforce to use each other’s data. So, we’ve sort of passed the hypothetical stage around this. We see that NetSuite and Salesforce are doing it now.
04:00 — NetSuite has been a part of Oracle for about eight years. And even though it still goes by the NetSuite name, it is 100% Oracle. Oracle and Salesforce have their own competitive issues, and clearly, we see here that despite that, NetSuite and Salesforce are moving ahead on this.
05:01 — So perhaps we will see another multi-cloud miracle from Larry Ellison. It’s going to be very interesting to watch. I think he gave enough hints at CloudWorld that this is going to happen. I think this is one thing we should bet on. It’s better for customers.
