Oracle: We’re punching above our category

Oracle claims to be “punching above our category” in the market for cloud platform and infrastructure services, proving its partners and rivals wrong that Oracle Cloud is only good for Oracle workloads.

Speaking to Computer Weekly on the sidelines of Oracle CloudWorld, Chris Chelliah, senior vice-president for technology and customer strategy at Oracle Japan and Asia-Pacific, said the company has since debunked that “misnomer” by supporting non-Oracle workloads and interconnecting its services with that of rivals.

In 2020, Oracle became the latest hyperscaler – joining others like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud – to support VMware workloads through the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution which provides a dedicated, cloud-native VMware-based environment for enterprises to move their VMware workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Oracle has since picked up customers like the National Stock Exchange of India, which is running Oracle and VMware workloads on OCI, “achieving tremendous performance and availability within a short period of time”.

Chelliah said Oracle has also been working on interoperable services in a bid to tear down barriers to multicloud adoption.

During his keynote address on the first day of CloudWorld, Oracle chairman, chief technology officer and co-founder, Larry Ellison, noted that cloud providers have been building “wall gardens” around their services, making it hard for enterprises to achieve interoperability between different clouds.

Pointing to Ellison’s remarks, Chelliah said through interconnectivity services with Microsoft Azure, for example, enterprises can connect Oracle databases running in OCI to Azure workloads to improve overall performance and user experience for customers.

Another example is MySQL Heatwave, an in-memory query accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service that lets organisations perform transaction processing, analytics and machine learning on data in MySQL databases on other clouds like AWS – without incurring data egress fees or facing higher latency when accessing a database service running in Oracle’s cloud.

“We see a huge opportunity in markets like India and Southeast Asia where organisations are either using the Oracle database or open-source databases, and MySQL Heatwave brings those together,” Chelliah said.

Oracle does not break down revenue numbers by geography, but globally the company has been achieving consecutive quarters of growth, driven primarily by cloud offerings such as autonomous databases and, more broadly, OCI, with a higher percentage of revenue coming from recurring subscriptions.

As it grows bigger, Oracle has also started to pay more attention to building developer mindshare around OCI, an area where it lacks rivals like AWS. It recently added new developer services for building cloud native apps, pre-trained AI, data services, and low-code development, as well as solutions to improve security, observability and developer experience.

“Developers are going like: Oracle is starting to wake up,” Chelliah said. “Just as we took away the barrier of adoption for enterprises, we're taking away the barriers to adoption for developers by accommodating what they are already doing because it's sometimes a religion change.

“We’re speaking the developer’s language and our certification numbers have gone through the roof, especially in markets like China and India where there are lots of developer mindsets,” he added.

According to data from Synergy Research Group, global spending on cloud infrastructure services in the second quarter of 2022 approached the $55bn mark. Despite turbulence in currency markets and a stronger US dollar, that still represents 29% growth from last year.

AWS’s worldwide market share increased by over a full percentage point to almost 34%, with AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud accounting for 65% of the market during the quarter. Oracle’s market share stood at 2%.