“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.
