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 share some reasons it’s likely to be a good year for Oracle.
Highlights
00:27 — For Q2, the numbers Oracle reported disappointed some financial analysts, and the market cap took a whack for that. I think that both founder and chairman Larry Ellison and CEO Safra Catz provided a huge amount of material to believe that 2024 is going to be a very good year for Oracle.
01:23 — You’ll see that over the past four months, from when it hit an all-time high of $348 billion in market cap, Oracle’s market cap is down about $65 billion from that. That was some short-sightedness on the part of financial analysts. I went very carefully through the December 11 fiscal Q2 earnings call, and I pulled out 10 primary reasons from Larry Ellison and Safra Catz to believe a strong 2024 is in the offing.
02:32 — One, Safra Catz called this, “the enormity of the pipeline that we have.” “We really just have unlimited demand for Oracle Cloud infrastructure.” Catz also said that for AI workloads, Oracle has become the default choice. Microsoft picked Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to do AI inferencing for Bing.
03:51 — We’re seeing massive AI demand, Catz and Ellison said, but it’s more than that. Then there’s the Microsoft miracle: Microsoft has gone from being an arch-rival to Oracle to now a rival, but also Oracle’s largest customer.
04:18 — There’s the imminent move of databases into the cloud. Catz said it’s just beginning. Nation-states are buying Oracle data centers. According to Ellison, Oracle is doing the data center buildout in a unique way, not the giant data centers like the other hyperscalers, but small ones.
04:58 — Oracle’s in the AI market on multiple levels, from infrastructure to its own applications, partner applications, and more. It’s throwing everything it has at the giant healthcare market, the largest industry on Earth. Finally, there’s the Alloy program, which allows partners to become cloud providers.
