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In Oracle's Cloud Pitch To Enterprises, an Echo of a Bygone Tech Era (siliconangle.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Oracle sought to position itself once again this week as the best place for everything companies need to move to cloud computing. On Thursday, executives at the database and business software giant distanced Oracle from public cloud leaders such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure that provide computing, storage and other services to corporations looking to reduce or eliminate their data centers. "Our cloud is more comprehensive than any other cloud in the market today, a full end-to-end cloud," said David Donatelli, Oracle's executive vice president of converged infrastructure. "We design from the chip all the way up to the application, fully vertically integrated." What's interesting about that messaging, which Oracle has been refining since at least its OpenWorld conference last September, is not simply the competitive positioning. Oracle is essentially saying that the nature of cloud computing suggests customers need to move away from the notion that has dominated information technology since personal computers and PC-based servers began to displace mainframes and minicomputers: cherry-picking the best applications and hardware and cobbling together their own IT setups. In short, Oracle contends, it's time for another broad swing back to the integrated, uber-suppliers of a bygone era of technology. Of course, the new tech titans such as Google, Facebook and Amazon arguably wield as much power in their particular domains of advertising and e-commerce as the Big Blue of old. But it has been a long time since a soup-to-nuts approach has worked for enterprise tech companies, and for those few still attempting it, such as Dell and Oracle, it's far from obvious it will work. The cloud, Oracle contends, may well change that.
>> it has been a long time since a soup-to-nuts approach has worked for enterprise tech companies
If you were subject to as many sales pitches from large vendors as I am, you would know that Amazon, Google, IBM and Oracle all offer "full stack" PaaS services including table-based DBs, nosql DBs, ESBs/queuing, application runtime environments, etc. In fact, the term "Cloud 3.0" is being used by a bunch of them to describe their soup-to-nuts PaaS solution.
"We design from the chip all the way up to the application, fully vertically integrated."
If that were true then they wouldn't be using...
* x86_64 architecture CPUs
* Linux
* shit they got when they bought Sun
* lots of platform software they didn't write
but rather something they developed on their own.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
This is a matter of economics. Some of the expenses for running an application vary significantly in proportion to use while others do not. In the case of cloud services and particularly for comprehensive services, this allows for the lowest achievable cost as there is not limit on savings at scale and less wasted/unused capacity over time.
You may idealize Hadoop, Pig, Scala, et al. but realize that hosting any part of your own solution requires major investment in hardware, utility, and especially personnel. That isn't just "programmers, that includes maintenance workers from janitors to facilities professionals and everyone else required to keep a building in working order. Then additional financial costs in insurance, loan amortization given the huge capital expenditures otherwise required, etc.
This is what enables arguments for a fixed price or some mix of fixed and metered usage billing. IT in business is a business process, and in most companies IT services are a cost center best minimized to allow more productive investments for actual business growth.
We were forced into buying credit for their cloud to settle a licensing compliance dispute. The credit was only good for 12 months so we gave it a try.
It completely sucks. Nobody should ever use it. Just use AWS, Google, or Azure instead, they've actually got mature cloud models, unlike Oracle.
"Our cloud is more comprehensive than any other cloud in the market today, a full end-to-end cloud," said David Donatelli, Oracle's executive vice president of converged infrastructure. "We design from the chip all the way up to the application, fully vertically integrated."
So in other words, vendor lock-in? That what I take out of this, they're a vertically-integrated monopoly, meaning that they handle everything from the very top to the very bottom. Because nothing is from other entities, it means that everthing one does here is Oracle-based. Once you join and tailor your stuff to their system, you cannot simply leave their system for another.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
then based their quotes on taking 80% of our profits. Oracle is evil. They don't charge a fair price but instead take all that they can.
I have used Oracle products for a long time. At Open World it was all they talked about. They are trying to frame this as a benefit for the customer. The real reason they are pushing cloud is that it is more profitable for Oracle. With the current ERP offerings they have to support a multitude of hardware, operating systems, databases, middleware, firewalls, etc. It is an enormous effort to try to keep up with all the 3rd party patches. By moving to cloud Oracle only has to support one stack - theirs.
Cloud might sound great but I have seen studies that show the first few years you are ahead. After that the costs rise dramatically. Remember, you are not buying software you are renting it. You also give up a lot of control. Control over when your systems are patched, outages, feature rollouts. Your data is no longer in your control. It is sitting one someone else's servers. That alone is enough to make it a non starter.