back to article Ellison: Oracle's now a Cloud biz. Ignore everything I said before

Despite once declaring that the cloud was “complete gibberish”, “insane” and “idiocy”, former Oracle head honcho Larry Ellison has announced that the firm is now ready to be the foundation of the cloud for its customers. Larry Ellison speaking at Oracle Openworld yesterday (28th September) Speaking at the company’s Openworld …

  1. Fenton

    Arrogance

    His Arrogance may have helped build Oracle to what it is today, unfortunately he believes his own FUD so much he is not looking reality in the face. If you are looking at cloud you are generally not looking at a homogeneous stack.

    If a service is running in the cloud the end user/customer does not give a flying f* which database is running in the background. All they want is

    a) A service that provides the functionality they need

    b) A service that meets the SLA

    c) The ability to chop and change quickly between rival services

  2. Alister

    I still think Hurd 'N' Katz were an inspired choice, purely for the opportunities it presents for a pune or play on words...

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ellison goes where he thinks the money is

    And in typical Ellison fashion, when he decides it is time to move, it is too late. This will likely end up with Oracle buying some medium size cloud player and squeezing whatever they can out of the acquisition before leaving it to quietly die. Take any recent and not so recent Oracle acquisition as an example of that. These moves likely make sense from a financial perspective, and surely they are profitable, but from a business development perspective they mean nothing.

    Oracle, like Microsoft, lives under the leader's dilemma when facing new technologies that challenge their leadership status: these technologies are pushed by people that have zero margins to preserve, and these little mammals can be very aggressive in their pricing. For Oracle to effectively compete in cloud, it has to abandon the very lucrative revenue source that has made the giant that is today.

    So close to zero chance of Oracle doing really anything on the cloud other than bullying and mocking other players that are in the same situation (SAP, are you there?)

    PS: Microsoft is an exception in the cloud case, they seem to be willing to push Azure even if it means breaking their Windows lock-in.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Ellison goes where he thinks the money is

      Yes, I know more than a couple people who left Oracle last decade because they wanted to press cloud services, and Oracle finance in particular pushed back decisively on the grounds that "You're not going to cannibalize our maintenance stream". Of course, that leaves the marketplace to the then-insurgents like Salesforce.com, Workday and Netsuite, who don't care what happens to Oracle's maintenance revenue stream.

      That being said, Oracle does seem to have a certain level of religion on cloud services now. But they are kind of a "me-too" offering at this point.

  4. dogged

    Is it just me or is Larry becoming indistinguishable from Micky Rourke?

  5. Javapapa

    Watching the keynotes

    Pretty obvious to me that no one presenting keynotes at OpenWorld or JavaOne has ever studied Steve Jobs and his style and grace when presenting, let alone his dedication to weeks of rehearsal. Battery failure of a hand held slide controller? Hundreds of words on a slide? Pitiful repeat of a claim as a desperate plea for applause?

    New market opportunity: SJaaS

  6. I.Geller Bronze badge

    Too risky claiming Oracle owns database Industry and Internet?

    Structured data is the future of database industry, it allows to convert Internet into database.

    Oracle already structures data which provides us all 100% privacy.

    1. Oracle obtains statistics on queries and data from the data itself, internally.

    3. Oracle gets 100% patterns from data.

    4. Oracle uses synonyms searching.

    5. Oracle indexes data by common dictionary.

    6. Oracle killed SQL.

    However, Larry Ellison said not a word on that. Why?

    The structured data is the revolution: no more tables, no more rows and columns, no more search on Internet, 100% privacy. Too risky claiming Oracle owns database Industry and Internet? Larry Ellison has a company to run

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