Amazon Cloud Chief Jabs Oracle: 'Customers Are Sick of It' (cnbc.com)

It's no secret that Amazon and Oracle don't see eye to eye. But things are far from improving, it appears. From a report: On Wednesday, two months after Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd called Amazon's cloud infrastructure "old" and claimed his company was gaining share, Amazon Web Services chief Andy Jassy slammed Oracle for locking customers into painfully long and expensive contracts. "People are very sensitive about being locked in given the experience they've had the last 10 to 15 years," Jassy said on Wednesday on stage at Amazon's AWS Summit in San Francisco. "When you look at cloud, it's nothing like being locked into Oracle." Jassy was addressing a cultural shift in the way technology is bought and sold. No longer does the process involve the purchase of heavy proprietary software with multi-year contracts that include annual maintenance fees. Now, Jassy says, it's about choice and ease of use, including letting clients turn things off if they're not working.

Comments

Attitudes

[sehlat]

Oracle: We own our software ... and our customers.

Amazon: We own our software ... and we are our customers' assistants.

Re:Attitudes

[DontBeAMoran]

Me: I don't want your clouds, why should I waste my bandwidth and endure slow access times when I can store my files and my backups locally?

Re:Attitudes

[hawguy]

Me: I don't want your clouds, why should I waste my bandwidth and endure slow access times when I can store my files and my backups locally?

If you're storing your files and backups locally, then you don't really have "backups", you just another copy of data that will be lost in the fire/flood/tornado, whatever.

Re:Attitudes

[ranton]

Me: I don't want your clouds, why should I waste my bandwidth and endure slow access times when I can store my files and my backups locally?

If you're storing your files and backups locally, then you don't really have "backups", you just another copy of data that will be lost in the fire/flood/tornado, whatever.

When I read his comment I can't tell if he was mocking anti-cloud IT folk or actually is one. It's too hard to tell.

Re:Attitudes

[vux984]

What if Russia nukes the whole of USA?

What are you trying to preserve in the event of nuclear holocaust?

Are you a librarian concerned about preserving humanities knowledge through another dark age? Or are you concerned about preserving the Xena fan fiction you were writing?

The former might consider hard copy and tapes in out of the way bunkers... the latter probably has more pressing things to worry about...

Re:Attitudes

[Gumbercules!!]

Frankly, if my city gets Nuked, the viability of my business is probably going to be somewhat in question, in any case. My ability to recover my up to date accounts receivable data will probably be more than a little redundant, when all of those debtors have been vaporised, money is worthless and, if by some miracle I'm not dead or dying of radiation sickness, I still have access to an electricity grid, to run my computers.

If you're running anything smaller than a country and "nuclear war" is in your contingency plans, you're probably focusing on the wrong concerns.

Since when?

[epyT-R]

Since when is SaaS not all about lock in?

Re:Since when?

[XXeR]

Since when is SaaS not all about lock in?

I'd argue it's not about SaaS being "about lock in" or not. It's more about implementation time and/or upfront investment for whatever you purchase.

If a SaaS service requires no upfront investment of hardware and takes little time/effort to implement, then lock in is a silly thing for which to strive via licensing and will push potential customers to the competition. On the other hand, if either are true, lock in occurs by default to some extent...with or without licensing.

Bring it on!

[Tablizer]

I like the fight: competition in action. I wish telecoms would bash each other over forced bundling, lousy reliability, lousy customer service, etc. etc. etc. etc.

Of course they're sick of it

[DeplorableCodeMonkey]

Oracle is such an entrenched, parasitic, rent-seeking corporate shit pile compared to most of the industry that they make even staunchly conservative capitalists tempted for a split second to raise the sickle and hammer after dealing with them.

Mainframe on cloud?

[Blaskowicz]

Speaking of old, why not hook up a mainframe to the "cloud"? It's all built around I/O, partitioning and billing the user anyway.
Let's have a single computer datacenter. We can achieve the classic vision of one computer per continent.

I believe curious people might try to use it. I know there are emulators and a freeware IBM OS version from before I was born, so it is certain that millions of people never had the chance to try doing something, anything at all with a mainframe.

I have a pitch for it : "The state of the art in NoSQL and consolidation."

Re:Sour Grapes

[MouseR]

I deal with so many functionality points in Oracle Documents Cloud (aka, Oracle Content) that I'm not even sure what functionality has actually shipped and those that are about to be released in a planned update, so I wont comment on what's there or about to get there.

But I can tell you it's a whole lot more than a mere document repository.

While licensing for that (say the iOS client) is yearly (and not lock-in), once you get going with the product line, it's a bit difficult to move this data off to another service because you loose all data integration with other processes (whichever they may be that I'm not comfy discussing right now).

When a large company moves such infrastructure, the biggest cost is data migration (there are some Oracle groups specialized in that).

From my perspective though (the iOS client for Documents Cloud), we work hard on new feature and integration. We deal with 4 different server infrastructures behind the scene to link up your data. And despite the cloud offering, we're still working on On Premise where YOU control storage.

Not going to comment on Amazon's infrastructure but I was not happy to see my Netflix go when S3 had a flat tire. :-)

My opinion is my own. Not talking for Oracle (my employer) nor am I a representative.