Oracle's insane cloud strategy

Amazon, Google and Microsoft invest billions in their own data centers and hardware. They have it down to a science. They have dedicated teams of engineers onsite in their own data centers to keep everything running smoothly with quick and efficient response times. Hard drives are attached with Velcro because it takes too long to screw them in. When a customer signs up they can scale globally within minutes.

Contrast this with Oracle, when I was asked by a customer how long they would have to wait on the Exadata cloud service to be ready if they signed a contract today I had to reach out to the installation team to get a response. At the time (2017) Oracle had no spare capacity. I assume this is still true. I had to tell the customer the truth. It would take 6 weeks to build the Exadata machines, drop ship them to the rented data center and network them. Oh and by the way they had to buy double the capacity so they could fail over between availability zones, and pay extra for active data guard per core so they could atleast read from the standby data centers. It was an obscene cost and a ridiculous lead time. I left Oracle shortly after this conversation. It was clear to me that Oracle is putting little investment in its only stated hope for survival.

Oracle rents data centers and invests in hardware when a customer makes a purchase. When Oracle gets serious and its expands its data centers its all leased, all of it. It's not a serious commitment, their investment is leased and should Oracle decide cloud was a bad idea, like running hardware was with Sun, Oracle could shut it all down tomorrow.

The idea that Oracle can be a serious contender in cloud demonstrates a complete lack of understanding at the executive level. The executives at Oracle have no idea what cloud really is. It was so bad that after 22 years of service, TK the president of Oracle resigned on Oct 2, 2018 frustration and went to Google.

Oracle tried to pivot to the cloud and made some "serious" attempts since 2016. The executive belief is that they can win cloud with superior software. Lets analyze the insanity. What does this software run on? It runs on hardware that takes a 6 week lead time. What customer is going to wait for this? Oracle refuses to invest in the hardware necessary to make this a 5 minute lead time like the rest of the cloud providers.

They are hard at work rolling out their "superior software" in their next gen cloud. They have abandoned their first version of cloud, and the customers that run on it have no easy upgrade path. Its only been two years since 2017. Amazon has over two decades of software development in their cloud. 2 years against 20. Oracle hired engineers from Amazon, true but it really hasn't been enough time to battle test it.

Oracle lacks core features like routing. Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. Oracle bought Dyn to help with DNS routing then laid most of the employees off. As far as I know they have no real answer to the problems solved by Amazon Route 53.

There is no comparison between Amazon and Oracle's cloud. The feature gap on the software side a lone is staggering. Oracle executives really believe they are rolling out something that will compete with amazon in the gen2 cloud right now. Its not even in the same ballpark. The feature gap in software between Oracle and Amazon cloud software is immense. Its about as big as the infrastructure gap.

The CO CEO at Oracle that is out on medical leave was never known as an innovator. He was known for cutting costs. What remains is a fractured executive team with no real understanding of cloud. Its a feeble attempt at best with no investment in building data centers or buying hardware.

All I can say is that this strategy has no chance of success. If you have any understanding of what cloud is and you continue on this path of not putting in software features, not owning your own data centers with dedicated teams on engineers onsite, not buying hardware and having in networked before the customer buys, you have to be insane if you think you will succeed.

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/oracle/oracle-cloud-puts-data-center-expansion-pedal-metal

After years of watching its largest rivals in cloud services spend billions of dollars on infrastructure quarterly – while keeping its own data center investment relatively modest – Oracle’s cloud business is accelerating expansion.

The company announced on Monday a plan to add 20 new cloud availability regions to the existing 16 by the end of next year. The plan includes new Oracle cloud data centers in countries across the Americas, Europe, Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.

wait for it... this was posted 5 days ago...

Unlike its largest rivals Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, who both design and build their own data centers in addition to leasing facilities from specialist developers, Oracle is planning to continue relying on the latter exclusively, Leo Leung, senior director of product and strategy for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, told Data Center Knowledge in an interview.

rewind....

Unlike its largest rivals Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, who both design and build their own data centers in addition to leasing facilities from specialist developers

Oracle is planning to continue relying on the latter exclusively

the latter is leasing facilities from specialist developers

Correct statement

Oracle is planning to continue relying on leasing facilities from specialist developers exclusively

In the midst of this Oracle is letting its largest support base of installed on premise products "Melt away" as they focus on cloud. This means a decline in support revenue that keeps the company alive.

I would expect some serious reckoning in the near future, and that does not bode well for employees. Oracle has laid off in the good times and we have seen the reports here, what will it do in the bad times as support revenue shrinks and the next gen cloud fails to bring in revenue for the reasons listed above?

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It's true that Exadata capacity is more limited - it's an expensive item and so it costs a lot of money to buy a bunch of them only to have them sit idle. But as demand has scaled up, so has standby capacity, so customers can now use exadata instantly. The scale difference between 2017 and today is massive.

Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all make use of leased space as well. They also have company-owned facilities. There's nothing wrong or shady with making use of third party data centers. The leases are very long (10 years is not uncommon) and the real investment is in the hardware inside, which is all company owned. Oracle could not "just shut it down tomorrow" since their leases go out for quite a long time, the hardware is bought and paid for, and they have contracts with customers that go out years as well.

Mark Hurd was only in charge of the sales organization - his cost cutting was all on the sales side.

Reminds you of that Wiley Coyote cartoon with his legs frantically spinning in the airy after he’s gone past he cliffs edge, doesn’t it! And we know what comes next: a long and nasty fall to the ground, aka a crash! Stock going to $5

Go to he-ll oracle!

DOA cloud fraud

I left this company this year just after receiving HR appraisal reminder(the 2nd one) and before really discussing this with my manager. The appraisal was so arbitrary. The so-called core competencies are really a joke, and the way managers rate their subordinates is an even bigger joke. IMHO, this process is used to deter employees, and not to help create a positive working env. Anyways, my relationship with this company is over, and I'm glad that an opportunity came just at the time when I could not stay any longer after 8 + years.

OK, yes, there was no enough cloud provisioning automation at least several months ago. I had the opportunity working on a new SAAS product and when a customer order came in, people from many different departments or groups started setting up calls to figure out how to stack up the cloud service the customer ordered. Many issues occurred and sometimes running sql updates was required to allow a stuck process to move again. This company really needs a total culture change to be competitive again. Managers must respect their direct reports. Instead of demanding what and how their employees must do, they should help create a healthy working env so that people can really concentrate on contributing to the work they are hired for, instead of doing things to keep their bosses happy.

Gratis, Petmate, Laura Ashley, Vermont Country Store, Denby and multiple others Oracle Commerce subscribers have all experienced serious downtime this year. It's only a matter of time before they ditch the sh–show for somthing that actually works and is consistent

No one has any kind of plan, including the guys at the top. They are just shuffling money around for now with no intention of making any large structural changes.

Honestly, I don't think LE has ever had any idea what he's doing. He was just the guy with the big mouth that was willing BS with the press, while other people built the company and the db.

LE can't possibly turn the company around, because he never had anything to do with building the company in the first place. All the knowledge is gone. This has to be the last year.

It's all such a joke. Everyone in dev is busy backstabbing everyone else, trying to the be last to survive. It's such a sh—show. Everyone works for themselves. There is no one who cares about the longterm survival of the company. It's just about what you can get out of the company for now and how long you can keep yourself going.

The cloud venture has been a nightmare from the start. I remember hearing from a manager that when OCI was recently created it launched without any kind of automation. The customer would request instances and be notified when they where ready but what actually happened in the background was that there were a team of people on call 24/7 that created the instances when one was requested.

It's a nightmare. I started with them a little over 5 years ago, and bought in to the idea that executive management could turn everything around. The truth is that the real sales "push" to the cloud is only about 3 years old, and the company's only strategy for keeping its stock price relatively stable is cost-cutting by sending jobs out of the U.S. They are constantly laying off entire divisions (both Sales and Tech) and never giving any serious thought to the possibility that the problem lies with the quality of their product and how quickly the customer can start using it. Like most companies, executive management at Oracle rules by instilling fear amongst its workforce. In most tech companies, these is the primary strategy used by the Sales org. The problem at Oracle is that this strategy is also being used by executives for the team that is supposed to be responsible for driving innovation. Instead of admitting that Oracle needs to focus on creating a superior product, the company's only focus seems to be making through the next fiscal quarter with a crash in its stock price. The solution seems simple enough: invest heavily into creating a superior Cloud product that customers can use quickly after they decide to buy. The problem is that the man at the top won't admit that he's been wrong abouta lot of things. I think Oracle's stock price will continue to drop and they will be acquired by Microsoft within 2-3 years from now (if they're lucky). Good luck to all my fellow Oracle diehards. You all deserve better and I hope you find it soon.

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Oracle's insane cloud strategy

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