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 Oracle’s bold strategies are fueling its rapid growth in the cloud market.
Highlights
00:15 — Oracle has been the rugged individualist in the cloud infrastructure business. Last week, I talked about how in Oracle’s Q3 results, the biggest number that stood out was the incredible growth rate it showed in its RPO (Remaining Performance Obligation) — business that’s under contract, fully signed, but just hasn’t been recognized yet as revenue.
01:09 — So in Q3 ended February 28, if you recall, Oracle’s RPO went up 63% to $130 billion. I wanted to dig in a little bit and offer what I believe are 10 reasons behind this incredible surge. The first two are actually about Oracle’s Gen 2 architecture—a breakthrough way of designing these cloud data centers.
02:38 — The three original hyperscalers all had a similar model. Oracle came in with a different idea, which is, “Yeah, we’re going to build some ultra-large ones when that is the right approach for certain outcomes, but we’re also going to make a very big number of small data centers.”
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03:05 — Oracle’s gone the other direction, and it now has more than 100 regions up and running. CEO Safra Catz said it’s just a matter of time until it has more regions available than the other three hyperscalers combined. The AI segment of Oracle’s business — inferencing — is exploding.
04:30 — The Database multi-cloud agreements from last year — with Microsoft, Google Cloud, and AWS—allow customers to buy, deploy, and manage the Oracle database through those three competitors. It’s just extraordinary. Both Larry Ellison and Catz said that business has been doing incredibly well.
05:26 — Demand is spiking. The acceleration of the movement of Oracle databases to the cloud has been a big driver of this. The growth rates for Oracle Database continue to go up. And I think the final point, which can’t be overstated, is the presence of Larry Ellison himself — not only his vision, but his execution. He sees things in ways that others don’t.
