Oracle Wants to Beat Amazon in IaaS, PaaS

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Larry Ellison opens Oracle's OpenWorld 2016 with the bold declaration that "Amazon's lead is over," and announces plans to go after the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market next year. 

Currently, Amazon Web Services (AWS) leads the cloud infrastructure market, with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM trailing behind. Oracle’s public cloud didn't have enough market share to even be included the most recent version of Gartner’s cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) Magic Quadrant.

Amazon launched the EC2 service for renting out VM instances by the hour in 2006, and, in the most recent quarter, the AWS portfolio earned Amazon  $2.88 billion in sales and $718 million in operating income.

“But now we’re aggressively moving into infrastructure, and we have a new generation of data centers that we’re building around the world,” Ellison says.

For one example, Oracle is making available the Dense IO Shape (a virtual-machine type in this Oracle second-generation of cloud) which offers 28.8TB, 512GB, and 36 cores-- at a price of $5.40 per hour. More than 10X the input-output capacity of Amazon AWS, specifically the i2.8xlarge, says Ellison.

Larry EllisonThe founder-turned-CTO also says Oracle currently faces two main competitors-- Amazon for infrastructure and Workday for applications. This represents what Ellison describes as a "breathtaking change," since historically the two main Oracle rivals were IBM and SAP.

How will Oracle rival Amazon? First off, the Oracle Cloud Platform public cloud and virtual cloud network offerings get bare metal servers, providing means for customers to step to the cloud without moving away entirely from on-premises infrastructure. The Oracle Cloud Platform also gets support for Oracle MySQL Cloud Service, Oracle Big Data Cloud Service and Oracle Event Hub Cloud Service, alongside other Oracle PaaS offerings.

In the meantime the Ravello Cloud Service allows organisations to run enterprise VMware and kernel-based virtual machine workloads in a public cloud without need for changes or reconfiguration, the Oracle Container Cloud allows the deployment of application stacks through Docker compatibility and OracleFastConnect helps the connection of datacentres to the cloud.

On the PaaS side Oracle announces Database 12 Release 2 is available through the Oracle Cloud Platform in the database-as-a-service format. Another announcement is Exadata Express Cloud Service, a service built on the Exadata compute and storage system aimed at SMBs.

In total, OpenWorld involved 19 cloud service announcements, including the Oracle take on PaaS stock management, expanded container use, expanded collaboration in the Developer Cloud Service, a boosted Oracle Mobile Cloud featuring "actionable insights" and the self-explanatory Oracle Internet of Things (IoT) Cloud Service.

Ellison also used his keynote to tell the lessons learned from his time as a pro sailer-- a move he described "a very silly decision," since while he was good enough to sail against "a bunch of rich guys with boats," going against the sailing pros was something else entirely. As a result Ellison ended up training 6 hours a day, 4 days a week, and travelling to regattas every weekend.

“It never stops. It’s constant work—constantly trying to figure out ways to improve your game,” he said. “Here at Oracle it means recruiting the best people, trying to make the best strategic decisions. Every day learning something new. Every day trying to find an opportunity that exists today that didn’t exist yesterday. Talent is nice, but the amount of work that’s required for success is incredible. Sailing for me was very easy in the beginning, but as soon as you go to the top level, it’s an astounding amount of work. But it’s worth it.”

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