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 how the long-dismissed “legacy” giant Oracle continues to defy the odds and outperform expectations — particularly in the cloud database space.
Highlights
00:14 — It’s interesting what a little bit of time reveals to us. I was looking over Oracle’s numbers last week. It made me think back not too long ago, 10–12 years, we heard about all the Oracle Database killers, these startups with different companies that were going to knock Oracle off. So that whole fantasy fizzled.
AI Agent & Copilot Summit is an AI-first event to define opportunities, impact, and outcomes with Microsoft Copilot and agents. Building on its 2025 success, the 2026 event takes place March 17-19 in San Diego. Get more details.
01:42 — There were some wild fantasies that some high-level executives were willing to attach their names to publicly. So here’s a good one: The Oracle killer, was supposedly a new project by AWS — a database service 10 years ago, a database migration service brought out by AWS. It had been out for one week, and Business Insider called it the Oracle killer.
02:26 — The MongoDB CEO, in multiple articles, prophesied Oracle’s doom. He said they’d lost the heart and soul of the developers, that they were legacy, that they couldn’t keep up. I wonder what this guy’s doing now — see if he’s got his storyline a little bit more tightly fastened to what reality is doing.
03:02 — We see that Oracle’s cloud database services for Q1, which ended August 31, were up 32% to almost $700 million — so getting close to a $3 billion annualized run rate. And its multi-cloud business — where they’ve got the Oracle Database that wasn’t killed, now being sold by Microsoft, AWS, and Google Cloud — that revenue was up over 1,500%.
05:10 — I love these startup tech companies — they’re creating lots of new value. It’s when one, two, three, or four of those startups start chirping about how they’re going to rule the world soon, and they’re going to be the “so-and-so killers.” That, to me, is a good sign that you should look elsewhere to give your business.
