Oracle is turning to cloud rivals to extend the reach of its own Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and the database and other services that run on it.
The company already has been letting enterprises run its various database services on OCI housed in Microsoft’s Azure datacenters. At its Oracle CloudWorld 2024 show this week in Las Vegas, company officials said organizations can now do the same with Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructures.
Oracle CEO Safra Catz in her keynote address said Oracle had worked to build a cloud platform that was faster and more secure – and with greater functionality “to run it any way you want” – than other cloud providers. Catz also noted that in a constantly evolving IT environment driven by the cloud, AI and other impactful technologies, relationships between not only vendors and customers but also vendors and competitors can change.
The latest cloud partnerships are examples.
“Many of our longtime rivals are now our partners,” she said. “First Microsoft, now Google and AWS again.”
Navigating Through Challenges
Oracle and other tech vendors with cloud platforms face challenges when it comes to the cloud. It’s an environment where most enterprises continue to embrace multi-cloud strategies. According to Flexera’s latest annual “State of the Cloud” report, 89% of organizations surveyed are using multiple clouds, an increase from the 87% that said so last year.
At the same time, AWS, Microsoft, and Google dominate the global cloud infrastructure services space. The three of them account for 67% of the market, with AWS holding 32% of it. Microsoft has 23% and Google 12%, according to Synergy Research Group. Oracle is among the group of what Synergy analysts call the “tier two cloud providers,” overtaking IBM and now tied with Salesforce for fifth place on the list.
“Among the next group of companies, Oracle is now starting to separate itself to become a top five player, though the gulf between it and the leaders remains huge,” Synergy Chief Analyst John Dinsdale wrote. “In this market Google is almost five times the size of Oracle, while Amazon is almost three times the size of Google.”
The Partnership Play
Demand for more cloud vendors is growing but the bulk of the cloud market is controlled by three players, and many of the other cloud providers don’t have the means to build out the massive infrastructures to muscle their way in. Partnering with AWS, Microsoft, and Google is a good alternative.
Oracle is taking a different approach that most other vendors, who offer services that run directly on the cloud data center architecture of the big three providers. However, Oracle is giving organizations access to its cloud services through its OCI which is deployed in the larger providers’ data centers.
“We are seeing huge demand from customers that want to use multiple clouds,” Larry Ellison, Oracle chairman and CTO, said in a statement. “With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure deployed inside of AWS datacenters, we can provide customers with the best possible database and network performance.”
AWS CEO Matt Garman noted that enterprises since 2008 have been able to run Oracle workloads in the cloud, including AWS.
“This new, deeper partnership will provide Oracle Database services within AWS to allow customers to take advantage of the flexibility, reliability, and scalability of the world’s most widely adopted cloud alongside enterprise software they rely on,” Garman said in a statement.
Embracing Oracle and Google
Oracle this week launched Oracle Database@AWS, which lets its customers access Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Exadata Database Service on OCI in AWS. Through the partnership, Oracle will offer simplified database administration, billing, and unified customers support as well as low-latency connectivity between enterprise data in their Oracle databases and workloads running on AWS’ EC2 platform, analytics services, and AI and machine learning services.
With Google, Oracle announced the availability of Oracle Database@Google Cloud in four Google Cloud regions to start, two in the United States and one each in the UK and Germany. Oracle expects to rapidly expand that number in the coming months, not only in North America and Europe but also the Middle East, Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America.
The companies announced their expanded cloud partnership in June. As with the AWS partnership, organizations will be able to access Oracle database services running on OCI and deployed in Google Cloud data centers. They also can run applications on Oracle Linux that is now support by Oracle on Google Cloud, the vendors said.
In addition, they’ll be able to combine Google’s AI services like Vertex AI, Gemini foundation models, and Oracle Database 23ai, which became generally available in May and integrates AI capabilities like AI vector search into the database service.
“This new service combines all of the benefits of OCI database services with Google Cloud services for a seamless multicloud experience, which was unthinkable in the cloud space just a few years ago,” Karan Batta, senior vice president for OCI, said in a statement.
