Oracle CloudWorld heralded a flurry of announcements, as would be expected from so prominent an event. Some of the most significant were those Oracle made regarding launching or extending partnerships which signaled a significant shift in the cloud landscape. Oracle seems to be putting aside the fierce competition that may have existed with public cloud providers in the past, particularly around Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and is focusing on a need to cater to customer demand and accelerate overall cloud adoption.
While AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure remain highly competitive, few organizations today are relying on a single cloud provider for all their cloud services. This is partly because they are using software-as-a-service solutions to address CRM, HR or ERP needs, each of which may have unique infrastructure, but there are also concerns about avoiding lock-in with a single provider which might limit future flexibility.
Oracle’s announcements and partnerships herald a change in this perspective. By collaborating to make Oracle Database available on all three major cloud providers, while providing a unified experience with OCI, it demonstrates a willingness to meet customers where they are, regardless of their preferred cloud platform.
For both AWS and Google Cloud, this represents a new collaboration. In each case, customers will be able to run Oracle Autonomous Database, a fully automated and managed Oracle Database service, and the Oracle Exadata Database Service on their preferred cloud provider. Microsoft Azure will make Oracle Database@Azure available in six additional Microsoft Azure regions, with fifteen more to follow.
Customers have been able to run their Oracle workloads in the cloud for many years. The change that these announcements represent is that they could now seamlessly connect services from AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure with the latest Oracle releases. In addition, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will be deployed inside datacenters hosted by the cloud providers, ensuring that customers have exceptional performance.
Enterprise workloads have been migrating to the cloud for over a decade, a move that will continue to accelerate. These announcements recognize that Oracle wants to cater to the diverse needs of businesses while promoting greater cloud innovation. This is partly to secure Oracle’s position in the cloud and also a recognition of the reality that organizations have established relationships with public cloud providers that they don’t want to end. However, what is clear is that the cloud landscape is entering a new era of collaboration and flexibility.
What Does This Mean for Customers?
For those already using Oracle solutions in the public cloud or looking to do so without changing existing relationships with cloud providers, there are several advantages:
- Increased flexibility and choice. Customers will now have the freedom to use Oracle’s latest database solutions within their preferred cloud environment and link them to other services from those providers. This provides significantly enhanced flexibility and choice when it comes to cloud transformation.
- Enhanced innovation around cloud services and capabilities. Collaboration between Oracle, AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure will lead to greater potential for shared innovation. This may yield new solutions and advancements that customers can leverage but will at minimum provide the opportunity for customers to combine services from Oracle with those offered by cloud providers to offer new avenues for innovation.
- Improved scope for negotiation in cloud contracts. Given that Oracle is making it easier for organizations to use their provider of choice while still leveraging Oracle solutions, this will allow organizations more scope and flexibility in their negotiations both with Oracle and with the cloud providers. This may help provide improved contracts and service level agreements from vendors as well as time and expense savings.
