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 reflect on some previous remarks by Larry Ellison and whether they hinted at this week’s announcement from Oracle and Microsoft.
Highlights
00:22 — Oracle and Microsoft signed a deal wherein Microsoft will use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure AI, along with Azure AI infrastructure, to power inferencing for Microsoft’s Bing conversational search.
01:15 — If you go back to late September, the last day of Oracle CloudWorld, during Oracle’s financial analysts’ meeting, Ellison said the company’s technology is so good, and its prices are correspondingly so low, that one of the other hyperscalers, has come to Oracle and they’re working on a deal worth $1.5 billion.
02:09 — So at the time, there were no details. Now come forward to this week, we see this deal between Microsoft and Oracle. I don’t believe in coincidences. I really find it hard to think that AWS would ever agree to do anything where Oracle would be cast in a positive light. I don’t think it’s Google Cloud.
03:24 — The big thing that comes out of this is the evolution and the revelation of this extraordinary partnership between Microsoft and Oracle. A handful of weeks ago, Larry Ellison made his first visit to Microsoft headquarters in 46 years, resulting in something called Oracle Database at Azure.
04:50 — Microsoft is saying it thinks that Oracle’s AI infrastructure can do at least as good a job as theirs. It’s making public that Microsoft is using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure AI to help with Bing conversational search. Change is often jarring and wrenching, and it’s up to the people who are leading that revolution to really set the new terms.
05:24 — That’s what we’re seeing from Oracle and Microsoft, all the way from the top, with Larry Ellison and Satya Nadella. This will be fascinating to see. Who knows, maybe it is the $1.5 billion deal that Ellison teased a few weeks ago.
