Oracle cloud supremo Thomas Kurian extends temp leave to the heat death of the universe

It's Friday afternoon on the US West Coast, and everyone's playing pingpong in the office. The East Coast is ordering the next round of martinis. The Europeans are stumbling home from the pub. The Australians are hitting the beach. Anyone by their computer or phone is glued to rolling headlines of Facebook's gigantic security …

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle didn't lie about Kurian. No Sir!

In Oracle's initial announcement, three weeks ago, Kurian took an extended leave from the company.

Well, this is indeed an extended leave. Very extended. It's soooooooo extended, it will probably last well past Kurian's lifespan.

There was no lying here. Fake news! Fake news!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Oracle didn't lie about Kurian. No Sir!

Three weeks ago was still in the "quiet period " before the quarterly results announcement, an executive at Kurian's level probably couldn't actually resign then without drawing SEC attention.

[EricM]

Cloud is crucial to Oracle? I doubt that is really the case.

"Cloud" will in restrorespect probably be the initiative that broke Oracle...

Coud is the actual hype and here to stay, agreed.

However, Oracle was/is mainly a _tool_ vendor. Oracle DB, Oracle Middleware and a host of other products have been very competitive offerings in the past.

As cloud provider Oracle is an also-ran. And I don't see that changing.

The negative effects: While Oracle frantically tries to grow it's own cloud buisiness, other Oracle products suffer from less-than-stellar support, Oracle licensing is tightened up to forbid cloud installs on other vendor's clouds or to make these very expensive.

So it has become rather inconvienient and/or expensive to use Oracle tools on everything else than on Oracle's own cloud stack if your runtime or development enviroments include cloud servers, VMs, containers or anything else apart from bare metal servers... and which environments do not do that in 2018?

My prediction is: Oracle hurt themselves in the long run:

1) Oracle Cloud is set to keep its niche position against the likes of AWS and Azure. Economies of scale prevent keeping pace with the big players.

2) In its effort to help their own cloud business, Oracle destroys the value of their tool portflio they built and purchased in the last 25 years, by driving away customers through licensing mayhem.

3) The way Oracle currently tries to press customers into Java support contracts for Java 8 and 11 will make it very difficult for their sales teams to sell anything to anyone who is not yet dependant on their software.

[Duncan Macdonald]

Re: Cloud is crucial to Oracle? I doubt that is really the case.

When did ANY Oracle product get stellar (or even good) support?

Oracle's problem is that many of its customers realize how badly Oracle gouges them and have been looking for alternatives. Other databases (and their tools) have got good enough that for many users moving away from Oracle is now possible. Even where moving existing applications is not currently viable, it is perfectly viable to make new applications (especially Cloud ones) use other suppliers products.

Sensible users will not want to extend Oracle's grasp on their organization by using Oracle's Cloud - even M$ is a better bet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Cloud is crucial to Oracle? I doubt that is really the case.

Cloud providers are encouraging the serverless methodologies and looking to encourage moving away from a monolithic application structure. One of the things that comes with that is "localised storage", that is you don't have a huge database of everything, you simply store what you need temporarily and bin it having worked from offten simple common data storage. Lots of companies are looking into this as it's a huge leap forward in no only leveraging effective use of technology but also saves huge amounts of money. Sure the cloud providers like AWS make money as they store all your data and code and that costs money and yes there is risk of cloud lock-in, AWS Lambda is a prime example of potential serverless, cloud lock-in.

Oracle is fighting a losing battle to keep customers who are looking at the huge benefits and cost savings of serverless technologies. When you write apps for Oracle you're looking at huge investments in time and money and a long term deal and that's kept Oracle and other large RDBMS vendors going for years. Sadly huge RDBMS investments are starting to head towards a niche market, Oracle has had no choice but to create a cloud offering for those who want Oracle on cloud but it'll always be a niche player. AWS and Google offer so many toys in their toy box, 90% of which are open source, scaled up to incredible sizes and Oracle can only offer old-style clustered RDBMS systems which can scale up to huge size but they demand incredible engineering and hardware investments to make Oracle scale up work. Oracle are trying leverage what they have rather than looking to change the paradigms and that will only see them go the way of Ingres and Informix, still there but no longer relevant.

I say all this as a 25 year Oracle RDBMS veteran, the writing in on the wall. Larry's have a bloody good run and he will continue to make good money but the glory days of the RDBMS vendor leading the tech industry are fading fast.

[JohnFen]

Re: Cloud is crucial to Oracle? I doubt that is really the case.

"Lots of companies are looking into this as it's a huge leap forward"

Only if you define "huge leap forward" as "returning to the way things were done in the '60s".

[a_yank_lurker]

Re: Cloud is crucial to Oracle? I doubt that is really the case.

Another problem for the Minions of Larry is RDMS systems are a mature technology with many solid options available including FOSS. While migrating from one to another is not a trivial matter it is still eminently doable. So if the Minions antagonize a victim badly enough the victim might find an option that does include the Minions.

[TVU]

Re: Cloud is crucial to Oracle? I doubt that is really the case.

"My prediction is: Oracle hurt themselves in the long run:

1) Oracle Cloud is set to keep its niche position against the likes of AWS and Azure. Economies of scale prevent keeping pace with the big players.

2) In its effort to help their own cloud business, Oracle destroys the value of their tool portflio they built and purchased in the last 25 years, by driving away customers through licensing mayhem.

3) The way Oracle currently tries to press customers into Java support contracts for Java 8 and 11 will make it very difficult for their sales teams to sell anything to anyone who is not yet dependant on their software"

I'd have to add another relevant section if I may:

4) The way Oracle currently tries to sue everyone who uses Java in very high profile legal cases will now make it very difficult for their sales teams to sell anything to anyone who is not yet dependant on their software.

[JMiles]

Nothing new

Oracle never understood cloud and still don't. As far as getting clients to trust them... well their reputation precedes them and unfortunately it isn't so favourable.

Their best bet was to partner with Google or AWS but they thought they could go it alone without a real strategy or products that are cloud-friendly. IBM made a similar error but at least they tried to create some cloud-friendly products via BlueMix.

Microsoft is the only one out of Oracle/MS/IBM that seems to have some kind of cloud strategy and is making cloud-friendly offerings.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Nothing new

Oracle never understood cloud and still don't.

I think Larry understood it all too well when he described it essentially as snake oil in his OpenWorld keynote a few years back. Pity he was overruled by the rest of the management team.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Nothing new

Sounds like you don't understand cloud either.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Nothing new

Sounds like you don't understand cloud either.

Oh, I do. I remember it the first time round, when we called it "timesharing".

[fowljr]

Re: Nothing new

"Oh, I do. I remember it the first time round, when we called it "timesharing"."

Upvoted!!

[Merrill]

Re: Nothing new

If not for the IBM Service Bureau Consent Decree and the FCC Computer Inquiry II, we would have been doing cloud computing all along.

However, government distortion of technical rationality doesn't last forever.

[onefastskater]

Re: Nothing new

I remember Ken Olsen @ DEC remarking that Unix was stale oil. History repeats itself.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle should have bought Mulesoft and ramped up AWS and Azure compatibility rather than punishing customers who wanted cloud capability.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle are scum

The end.

[Zemus]

To compete in cloud infrastructure, Oracle must at least match the CAPEX spending of its rivals. This would decimate its profit margins and send its stock price into a tail spin. Oracle’s investors have become used to the company having the fattest profit margins in the industry. Oracle’s executives built their executive compensation model around those numbers. Basically, investors and executives are jointly unwilling to trade off profit margins for revenue growth. Despite consistently declining revenues, Oracle has 4 of the top 25 paid executives in the world, even though Oracle doesn’t even make it into the Fortune 100 list!

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/who-holding-oracle-back-ahmed-azmi/