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.
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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I explore how Larry Ellison and Oracle might be bringing a new era of cooperation among major cloud providers.
Highlights
00:12 — Larry Ellison might be bringing peace to the Cloud Wars. A year ago, Microsoft signed the big multi-cloud partnership with Oracle. Three months ago, Google Cloud joined with a similar multi-cloud partnership. This week, AWS became the third hyperscaler to join the multi-cloud partnership with Oracle. I put “peace” here with an asterisk, so let me clarify a little.
01:00 — I’m saying the peace is limited. Maybe it’s more like détente rather than peace. The other day, when Larry Ellison gave his keynote, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet, and Google’s parent company, was beamed in on video. Matt Garman, the CEO of AWS, was on stage during Ellison’s keynote. Amit Zavery from Google Cloud was on stage with Clay Magouyrk, the head of Oracle Cloud Infastructure (OCI).
02:23 — So I’m speaking with my tongue in cheek a little bit here about peace in the Cloud Wars in certain areas. I think, though we might see, based on this precedent, other ways in which these cloud providers find ways to work together for the greater benefit of customers. The big outcome that seems to be spurring customers to do this is that now the Oracle database is available on all the major clouds.
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03:18 — A lot of customers are saying that they use the Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud, but they’re also users of the Oracle Database. It was just too difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to access the Oracle Database while using these other clouds. So this is a much better, faster, more secure, simpler, easier-to-install solution.
04:00 — On stage with Ellison and AWS CEO Matt Garman was the Chief Technology Officer from State Street Bank, and he said,”I want to thank you guys for doing all the hard work to make this happen. Now me and my team get to do the fun stuff of building innovation on this . . . it’s so much easier for State Street Bank to use the tools it wants, such as AWS Cloud and Oracle Database.”
04:44 — Total peace is a long way off, and as it should be, because this competition makes everybody better and drives great benefits for customers. I give Oracle and Larry Ellison great credit for having this vision and pursuing it. Certainly, I give a lot of credit as well to the CEOs and other key leaders at Microsoft, Google Cloud, and AWS.
*Limited! Still plenty of vicious competition