What hardware? Oracle is on cloud nine, er, twelve right now – $200,000,000,000 Oracle says it has finally turned the corner with its cloud compute transition as it reports big gains for the business, both in the quarter and the fiscal year. The database giant said that its cloud and SaaS units now account for more than 10 per cent of its total revenue haul and will take on an even larger share of the …
I'm sure their business model of lock-in and huge licensing fees will still be operational. I never could figure out how the Oracle salespeople could convince so many large companies, and a huge amount of government agencies, to buy into licensing terms that were horrible for the buyer and wonderful for the vendor.
Of course the real funders of these agreements (taxpayers, stockholders, customers) have no idea why a particular IT contract is good or not. And of course there are some great emoluments to be had if you purchase some big red software. (Love that word emoluments - guess it's big right now for some reason.)
>I never could figure out how the Oracle salespeople
Not necessarily the sales people. As much as I loathe the company when it comes to mission or business critical there is reason they are still around. Price is some times not one of the main factors in database selection.
Last time I installed Oracle's database it was strangely insistent on doing some sort of long compile/link step near the end, which puzzled me greatly, as I thought I was essentially just transferring a set of binaries from a fat cpio archive to various places on my disk. Can anyone explain why Oracle did this, and if it still does? It seemed bizarre then and I'm sure it's even more so now, when everyone runs on VMs.
Having said that, and despite my antipathy for Larry Ellison, the database was rock solid.
It's done that for years, still does AFAIK. I'd always assumed it meant it was sure to be linked in with the most current libraries, so optimised for the target architecture. It was a pain as you needed to have linker tools installed on servers running oracle RDBMS which is a potential security issue.
I have a suspicion it was due to something in the 90s where some OS vendor(s) broke compatibility with a patch so they had to relink, but with better lockdown on ABIs/APIs now, it shouldn't be an issue.
Oh, and you're also supposed to relink after any OS patching/upgrades.
It's bound to fall shortly the the market realises this is just fluff.
MS and Amazon are spending 10s of Billions a year on data centres and infrastructure for their clouds, can Oracle afford to put in the ~$100Bn to catch up and be competitive before it's too late? Do Oracle even own a global fibre infrastructure to plug the DCs into?
> Do Oracle even own a global fibre infrastructure to plug the DCs into?
Do they need to? Wouldn't they just buy bandwidth of the global players like Global Switch, Equinix, etc. This is similar to how AWS and Azure work where customers order a cross connect into either expressroute or direct connect services at those CoLo POPs.
The real problem for Oracle and the other traditional providers is that they are used to making large margins and not used to price wars. Do they really want to play a game where AWS, Azure and Google are going to cut prices every few months for the foreseeable future?
That is IaaS, PaaS... SaaS is a different ballgame.
IaaS is only attractive to infrastructure people. Business people want SaaS. Pass and IaaS are a necessary evil. The "price wars" have not been price wars. They simply track the decline in cost per TB/per CPU clock cycle/per unit of network bandwidth, etc. They do that because there is little differentiated value in IaaS compared to SaaS and PaaS. The REAL differentiated value in Oracle's estimation is integration of the three along with DaaS. Time will tell if this is true. Oracle doesn't need to invest $100B in infrastructure. That sounds like something Johnny Canal would come up with. One thing is for sure. There will always be people who make their money cobbling together IT who will be threatened by Oracle, and there will always be business people demanding what Oracle delivers. Businesspeople don't read The Reg. They read Barron's.
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