Openly clamoring Amazon AWS, where Oracle Cloud Computing is confident

Recently, Larry Ellison announced at Oracle's press conference that Oracle will fully enter the field of cloud computing and start a positive battle with Amazon, even bluntly saying that "the era of Amazon's dominance will become a past tense."

At this time, Ellison was 72 years old and was still full of passion and gave up many words. Where did Ellison and Oracle come from?

Â Honesty, muscles still

In recent years, the IOE camp represented by Oracle (IBM is a server provider, Oracle is a database software provider, EMC is a storage device provider, and the three constitute an enterprise database system from software to hardware.) Indeed underestimated The iterative speed of the wave of cloud computing, and the rise of the Amazon and other companies have made series of fists, let the IOE caught by surprise. But we must say that the core resources are still in the hands of IOE in terms of top technology, talent, and enterprise-level products.

IOE is also actively transitioning to cloud computing, but the ship is turning heads. However, once these large ships with mature products, technologies, and talents turn their backs, it does not seem difficult to stage a show afterwards.

The IOEs who have been on the battlefield for decades have followed the corpses of thousands of companies. Which ones have not experienced many technological innovations? In the face of the blockade of companies such as Amazon, Oracle did not hesitate to deal with the way other companies are completely unable to learn.

Â Jedi fight back

The easiest and crudeest way to compete with opponents in areas where they are not dominant is to include talent, technology, and products in this field. In recent years, Oracle has invested billions of dollars in cloud computing to invest in mergers and acquisitions, and has rapidly transformed itself into an integrated cloud service provider spanning IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

Important acquisition case

In October 2011, US$1.5 billion acquisition of RightNow, a cloud services company

February 2012, $1.9 billion acquisition of talent management cloud service provider Taleo

December 2012, $875 million acquisition of cloud service company Eloqua

December 2013, US$1.5 billion acquisition of cloud marketing software provider Responsys

February 2014, $400 million acquisition of technology startup BlueKai

In June 2014, US$5.3 billion acquisition of Micros Systems, a provider of software and cloud services for the hotel industry

February 2016, $500 million acquisition of cloud software startup Ravello Systems

April 2016, US$635 million acquisition of Textura, a provider of architectural engineering cloud services

In May 2016, it spent $532 million to acquire energy-saving data cloud service company Opower

July 2016, US$9.3 billion acquisition of cloud service solution provider NetSuite

Heroic Wristbreak

From the perspective of acquisitions, Oracle began multi-dimensional cloud computing business five years ago. It is reported that, in order to fully support the cloud architecture, Oracle almost rewritten all software products, and redesigned the interaction of the application, and also developed a high-performance server chip. It can be seen from the bottom of the Oracle chip to IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and then to the industry applications, Oracle is revamping each layer of cloud computing.

Ellison repeatedly stressed that now that cloud computing is still in its early stages, Oracle is ready.

At the end of last year, Ellison explained the overall layout and product development ideas of Oracle Cloud Computing, and disclosed the strategic goals of Oracle Cloud at six levels:

Cost: Oracle Cloud is going to match the price of the AWS cloud even lower, reducing human error through automation and improving the efficiency of development and management.

Stability: Zero downtime and enterprise-level applications run continuously through fault tolerance and automation.

Performance: The high performance of memory-based computing is implemented in the database and middleware, providing high scalability of the system.

Standardization: Oracle Cloud supports all open standards in the industry, and in particular it will not lock users onto their own platforms, but will be free to migrate to other cloud platforms in the industry.

Compatibility: Enables automated migration of workloads and data in different cloud environments.

Security: Real-time data and system protection.

Analysts said that Oracle spoilers, with their strong appeal in the database market, are likely to come in later in the cloud computing market, making the entire cloud computing market more uncertain.

Aside from the immature Chinese market

While targeting Amazon, Oracle also began to deploy in the Chinese market. The domestic cloud service market has not reached the Red Sea period and has a large market gap. Last year, Oracle and Tencent Cloud collaborated to jointly develop cloud services. In addition, head of Oracle China, Li Hanmin, also announced the large-scale recruitment of cloud computing sales personnel in the Asia-Pacific region, totaling more than 1,000 people, of which China is the main battlefield. Oracle's SaaS business in China was launched two years ago. There are currently hundreds of customers and the number of customers is still rising.

Unexplorable "Ellison Iron Fist"

In the past 40 years, Oracle has created a very scary sales team that can force companies to buy Oracle products, even if these products are completely uneconomical in economic efficiency. This is the Larry Ellison Iron Fist that is widely circulated in Silicon Valley.

As we all know, the commercial operation ability of the sales team often plays a very important role in the cloud service. Google lags behind Microsoft in the progress of the cloud business. Its main reason is that because of Microsoft's deep plowing in the B-side market, it is easier to obtain large corporate customers. And Oracle's sales ability will undoubtedly have a great advantage in the cloud business, which is unmatched by Amazon, Google and other companies.

Tekken is not only tough, but also untouchable and unpredictable.

For Oracle, one of the most important acquisitions for cloud computing was the acquisition of Sun for $7.4 billion in 2009. At the time, the outside world was in a bad mood. They all claimed that Oracle had spent a fortune on acquiring a company in Japan. At the annual OOW conference last year, Ellison explained:

Since Amazon entered the cloud in 2006, I was thinking about how to win the cloud computing war. In addition to keeping a firm grasp of the SaaS application layer, Oracle must also have its own PaaS platform layer and IaaS infrastructure layer, which must have its own hardware system, and Sun just provided us with the best choice.

And now, Oracle has achieved the second highest score in the SaaS and PaaS markets.

Many of the decisions made by Ellison were often unclear at the time, but they were discovered after many years, oh, it turned out to be the case. In the next cloud service wars, no one knew the number of cards that Ellison could not see in the hands of outsiders.