Oracle 12.2 available on cloud first

“Amazon’s lead is over. Amazon is going to have serious competition going forward. And we’re very proud of our second generation of Infrastructure as a Service. We’re going to be focusing on it and aggressively featuring it not only during Oracle OpenWorld but for the remainder of this fiscal year and next fiscal year and the year after that.” said Oracle Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison in his opening keynote presentation at Oracle OpenWorld 2016.

  

What about Oracle’s new second-generation datacenters? According to Larry, it will offer twice as many cores as Amazon, twice as much memory as Amazon, 4 times as much storage as Amazon, and more than 10 times the I/O capacity of Amazon. Not only that, in order to get your order, Larry also promised you will pay less (than that paid to Amazon).

Is Oracle still a database company? Yes. It still sells its Oracle databases including Oracle Database 12c Release 2, aka, Oracle 12.2. But this time, Larry told the audience, “You will see as we develop features for the cloud, we’ll also start delivering our software in the cloud first. Clearly it’s going to go on-premises, but the first deployment of our database and a lot of our software now is going to go to the cloud first.”No surprise, the latest release Oracle 12.2 was officially announced to be first made available in the cloud. By checking Oracle website, there is no schedule yet for the on-premises version.

As I mentioned in my another article, Oracle has been working hard to convince customers to move to the cloud. Under current strategy, it makes sense for Oracle to attract more customers especially new ones into its cloud service. With its new push into IaaS market against Amazon, Oracle will need more applications and software running on its powerful and cheap infrastructure including its own latest software like Oracle 12c database. By doing this, Oracle will not only demonstrate the new software’s features and functions, but also fully test and fix its new software before shipping its on-premises version.

If your company has used Oracle Exadata machine, you know Oracle had developed “secret sauce” (software function) just for its own hardware to gain more performance. We can then expect Oracle to run its own software much better on its own cloud infrastructure than on other cloud platforms like Amazon.

However, the majority of Oracle’s revenue still came from its non-cloud business. Unlike Amazon, who generated its cloud business revenue from zero (without any legacy non-cloud IT services), Oracle might experience some sort of pain when cloud service eating some of its existing business.

No choice. Amazon is there, so is Microsoft. Larry knows he has to win in the cloud. “Oracle competes at all three levels of the cloud, all three tiers of the cloud.” he said in his keynote speech.

Oracle runs to Cloud, where will DBA go? (2)

As an Oracle DBA, you might think why Oracle cares so much about "CLOUD". For years, Oracle has been the No.1 RDBMS in the market.

Rank			DBMS	Database Model	Score
May 2016	Apr 2016	May 2015			May 2016	Apr 2016	May 2015
1.	1.	1.	Oracle	Relational DBMS	1462.02	-5.51	+19.93
2.	2.	2.	MySQL	Relational DBMS	1371.83	+1.72	+77.56
3.	3.	3.	Microsoft SQL Server	Relational DBMS	1142.82	+7.77	+11.79
4.	4.	4.	MongoDB	Document store	320.22	+7.78	+42.90
5.	5.	5.	PostgreSQL	Relational DBMS	307.61	+3.89	+34.09
6.	6.	6.	DB2	Relational DBMS	185.96	+1.87	-15.09
7.	8.	8.	Cassandra	Wide column store	134.50	+4.83	+27.95
8.	7.	7.	Microsoft Access	Relational DBMS	131.58	-0.39	-14.00
9.	9.	10.	Redis	Key-value store	108.24	-3.00	+13.51
10.	10.	9.	SQLite	Relational DBMS	107.26	-0.70	+2.10

Source: DB-Engines Ranking (as of May 2016)

Source: Gartner (October 2015)

However, when you scrutinize the latest company financial report (March 15, 2016), you will know why Oracle worries about its existing database business and cares more about "CLOUD".

• Cloud software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) revenues were$583 million, up 57% in U.S. dollars and up 61% in constant currency. 
• Cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) revenues were $152 million, down 2% in U.S. dollars and up 2% in constant currency. 
• Total Cloud Revenues were $735 million, up 40% in U.S. dollars and up 44% in constant currency. 

• Total On-Premise Software Revenues were $6.3 billion, down 4% in U.S. dollars and unchanged in constant currency. 
• Total Hardware Revenues were $1.1 billion, down 13% in U.S. dollars and down 8% in constant currency. 
• Total Services Revenues were $793 million, down 7% in U.S. dollars and down 2% in constant currency.

According the report from Fortune, "as for Oracle’s third quarter, sales of new software licenses for products that run on-premises fell 11% year over year. That on-premises category makes up 70% of Oracle’s overall revenue, so there’s reason for concern there." 

Also, when you check the above Gartner Magic Quadrant figure, you will find out Gartner placed Microsoft ahead of Oracle within the LEADERS's quadrant. It is not because of the market share of RDBMS, but the result of Microsoft's recent investments in its data platform, including Azure DocumentDB, the managed NoSQL database in the cloud. Microsoft SQL Server is also popular not only on-premises but in the cloud. In May, Microsoft also announced the SQL Server will soon be available on Linux.

On the other front,  Amazon which is considered as the absolute leader of cloud computing also grabs huge database market share and is surprisingly in the LEADERS's quadrant just below Oracle. As we all know, AWS offers Amazon RDS and Amazon DynamoDB. Last year, Amazon also launched its own database engine called Aurora as a new database service on the AWS cloud.

We don't even mention the competition from IBM (DB2) and SAP (SAP HANA) as well as other vendors like Teradata and tons of open source or NoSQL databases (MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB, etc.).

Oracle might still have years to collect money from its traditional RDBMS product and service, but Larry has to fight in the CLOUD. It matters.