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 discuss Oracle’s bold strategy for cloud infrastructure expansion and how it’s shaking up competition with AWS, Microsoft, and Google.
Highlights
00:30 — Oracle has been building out its cloud regions worldwide. Now, all the big hyperscaler companies (Microsoft, Google Cloud, AWS) are doing this, but Oracle has chosen a different path. Others are building a very small number of very large data centers, Oracle’s technology allows it to build not only large data centers but also large numbers of small or mid-sized data centers.
01:23 — Oracle CEO Safra Catz said last week that it’s just a matter of time until Oracle will l have more cloud regions than all its competitors combined. Again, its technology—what it calls its Gen 2 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure architecture—allows it to offer very small footprints for an entire cloud region, an entire cloud data center.
02:12 — Larry Ellison says, “We think we’re going to have cloud regions and cloud data centers in every country on Earth and in every major city on Earth.” At times, he said, “We’ll have thousands of these,” whereas it seems like the others will be in the hundreds. So this claim by Catz holds unless the other companies choose to begin offering smaller cloud regions and smart cloud data centers.
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03:21 — This unique approach has been a huge factor behind what I call Oracle’s stunning Q3 Remaining Performance Obligation (RPO) total of $130 billion — up 63% from a year ago. Clearly, if you take that 63% jump and the $130 billion total, that’s a financial metric for Oracle, but it represents a huge appetite among customers to step forward
05:07 — Larry Ellison said that AI inferencing has now leapfrogged AI training as the main reason behind the intensity and the need for these cloud regions around the world. This claim by CEO Safra Catz was certainly noteworthy as an indication of the differentiated strategy Oracle is taking versus the other companies that we broadly lump in the category of hyperscalers.
