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Oracle's CTO: No Way a 'Normal' Person Would Move To AWS (zdnet.com)
Amazon may have turned off its Oracle data warehouse in favor of Amazon Web Services database technology, but no one else in their right mind would, Oracle's outspoken co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison says. From a report: "We have a huge technology leadership in database over Amazon," Ellison said on a conference call following the release of Oracle's second quarter financial results. "In terms of technology, there is no way that... any normal person would move from an Oracle database to an Amazon database." During last month's AWS re:Invent conference, AWS CTO Werner Vogels gave an in-the-weeds talk explaining why Amazon turned off its Oracle data warehouse. In a clear jab at Oracle, Vogels wrote off the "90's technology" behind most relational databases. Cloud native databases, he said, are the basis of innovation.
The remarks may have gotten under Ellison's skin. Moving from Oracle databases to AWS "is just incredibly expensive and complicated," he said Monday. "And you've got to be willing to give up tons of reliability, tons of security, tons of performance... Nobody, save maybe Jeff Bezos, gave the command, 'I want to get off the Oracle database." Ellison said that Oracle will not only hold onto its 50 percent relational database market share but will expand it, thanks to the combination of Oracle's new Generation 2 Cloud infrastructure and its autonomoius database technology. "You will see rapid migration of Oracle from on-premise to the Oracle public cloud," he said. "Nobody else is going to go through that forced march to go on to the Amazon database."
The remarks may have gotten under Ellison's skin. Moving from Oracle databases to AWS "is just incredibly expensive and complicated," he said Monday. "And you've got to be willing to give up tons of reliability, tons of security, tons of performance... Nobody, save maybe Jeff Bezos, gave the command, 'I want to get off the Oracle database." Ellison said that Oracle will not only hold onto its 50 percent relational database market share but will expand it, thanks to the combination of Oracle's new Generation 2 Cloud infrastructure and its autonomoius database technology. "You will see rapid migration of Oracle from on-premise to the Oracle public cloud," he said. "Nobody else is going to go through that forced march to go on to the Amazon database."
"We have a huge technology leadership in database over Amazon," Ellison said on a conference call following the release of Oracle's second quarter financial results. "In terms of technology, there is no way that... any normal person would move from an Oracle database to an Amazon database."
I'm not qualified to evaluate the relative technical merits of the products but I can say without reservation that a HUGE win of going with Amazon is not having to deal with Oracle as a business. I've had that experience and Oracle can suck it as far as I'm concerned.
Why would normal people willingly get into a (by definition) abusive relationship with oracle?
We know most CEOs and other CxOs aren't entirely mentally healthy, if not outright psychopaths. But "normal" people?
Alright, many "normal" people run windows, which doesn't say anything good about their mental state either. But still.
Honestly, it's been years since I worked with a place that used Oracle as a database. Clearly, it's deployed in a lot of large scale operations out there. But my hunch is, many of them will keep using it as long as it remains a supported option - simply because you don't want to risk your business changing something established, that works.
It doesn't really matter if databases hosted via AWS are as good or better? What you have going on out there is a lot of people choosing AWS hosting for NEW projects that get deployed. If they're going to do something new and "cloudified", AWS is a primary candidate for the job.
Oracle's database is becoming a legacy product, much like a lot of IBM's offerings in the minicomputer days. When you're the size of an operation like eBay or a major airline and everything runs on Oracle databases, you're not going to be quick to tear that all out and try to reconstruct it on a different platform. So they have a nearly guaranteed revenue stream from it for years to come. But yeah, it's "90's tech" at this point and people aren't clamoring to roll out brand new projects that are powered by Oracle databases on the back end.
Don't worry, all of our customers are sufficiently locked in. No matter how much they hate us, and no matter how shitty our product is, they will never pay the enormous cost of transitioning to something else.
Oracle customers hate Oracle though. I hear more complaints about dealing with Oracle's business organization than complaints about Oracle's technology.
Stock prices rise when short term gains are realized. They fall when company profitability falls (either because the company is investing in long term strategic goals and costs go up or when revenues fall short).
In my experience, people who are always happy about stock prices going up tend not to think about the next few years. Ditto with people who are always upset any time a stock they own goes down in price.
I was just quoted 120k... for an Oracle cloud solution... for a test environment
No thanks.
You're both right. And so is Ellison. Just because everybody who uses Oracle wants to get away from it doesn't mean that there's an easy path for doing so. People don't use Oracle because they want to. They use it because they don't think there's a viable alternative, and because their business logic is built around the sorts of consistency guarantees provided by SQL and transactions and all that other fun stuff that alternatives either don't provide or don't provide as well.
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AWS is incredibly hard to get off once you start, and can get quite expensive. It's the worst solution out there. Except for hosting the server yourself and needing to maintain it. Or using Oracle. Or...
But the lock-in is pretty scary from a business point of view. I mean, if AWS raises prices by 20%, how are you going to move it to another provider? How are you going to move your data? Are you going to have to switch DB engines? Are you using the Lambda service, cause where are you going to run that code? Or with the various other services?
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I think I am getting old, This seems like the Statement a company makes shortly before its collapse. Mostly due to not understanding its customer and their needs.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
All ERP products are shitty, not just the Oracle ones.
Atlassian are heading in the same direction but in a more passive-aggressive way.
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This is Oracle, though. Callous disregard for or showing a lack of understanding of their customers or their needs is Larry's Company moto.
Oracle is the IBM of legacy databases. Nobody got fired for choosing Oracle. Anything Java with Enterprise in the name gets tied to Oracle for storage quickly. And every certified Oracle DBA on your payroll with remind you of those facts.
Meanwhile Payroll is quietly weeping at the zeros on those Oracle DBA paychecks. But you can't hear them because Purchasing is yelling loudly about Oracle Sales Lawyers counting the embedded CPUs in your coffee makers as a 'licensable core count.'
The technology may be solid, but the company itself is a nightmare to deal with. But licensing is at least easy: how much money do you have? They want more.