Oracle’s Cloudy Future – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

Excerpt from a long-term Oracle perspective; tangentially, see Microsoft Azure Germany now available via first-of-its-kind cloud for Europe (Azure blog)

"Ellison, meanwhile, got up on stage at the company OpenWorld conference this week and declared that “Amazon’s lead is over” when it comes to Infrastructure-as-a-Service, all because Oracle’s top-of-the-line server instance was faster and cheaper than Amazon. Well sure, but hierarchical databases were faster than relational databases too; speed isn’t everything, nor is price. Optionality and scalability matter just as much as they always have, and in this case Oracle’s quite basic offering isn’t remotely competitive.

Ellison’s statement is even more ridiculous when you look at the number that really matters when it comes to cloud services: capital expenditures. Over the last twelve months Oracle has totaled $1.04 billion in capital expenditures; Amazon spent $3.36 billion in the last quarter, and $10.9 billion in the last twelve months. Infrastructure-as-a-Service is not something you build-to-order; it’s the fact that the infrastructure and all the attendant services that rest on top of that infrastructure are already built that makes AWS’s offering so alluring. Oracle is not only not catching up, they are falling further behind."

Oracle’s Cloudy Future – Stratechery by Ben Thompson