Long-term rivals are now our partners: Oracle leadership on offering multi-cloud solutions

Oracle chairman Larry Ellison and CEO Safra Catz gave a glimpse of the next phase of cloud adoption and innovation for the technology giant, driven by its recent multi cloud partnerships with rivals Google Cloud, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Ellison and Catz were speaking at the company’s flagship event Oracle CloudWorld 2024 in Las Vegas. The company leaders highlighted how multi-cloud will lead to customers getting interoperable services and features across the globe and at shared costs.

This comes a day after the company announced its partnership with AWS and launched Oracle Database@AWS. The new offering will allow customers to access Oracle Autonomous Database on dedicated infrastructure and Oracle Exadata Database Service within AWS.

This will help customers get access to a unified experience between Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and AWS, offering simplified database administration, billing, and unified customer support.

Speaking at the event, Ellison said, “Oracle’s event should now be called Open MulticloudWorld…Large companies operate in a lot of countries, sometimes there are data sovereignty rules that have to be obeyed. This multicloud world will see a lot of data centres scattered throughout the globe. It’s very exciting.”

“Oracle has now reached a point where we have connected our cloud with AWS, Google and Microsoft and we have put up Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) data centres with all of them,” he added.

Catz said, “We have built our cloud differently. It’s faster, secure and gives you the option to run it anyway you want. You can run it in a private or a public cloud, have your own dedicated region, you can run it on a sovereign cloud or even in an air gap cloud or just be on a ship, we can reach you anywhere…Many of our long-term rivals are now our partners.”

Citing an example of how the multi-cloud world will work, Ellison explained that a Google Cloud customer could now use Oracle database. And if it’s an Oracle Cloud customer they too can use Google Gemini from the Oracle Cloud.

“The interesting thing about multi-cloud is whichever is your primary cloud, you can reach out to other clouds, infrastructure cloud and very soon the application cloud. You will be able to mix and match the applications and services you want,” he said.

This strategy has played out well for Oracle in the recent quarters. The company announced its first quarter earnings for FY25 on September 9, beating street estimates on revenue. Quarterly revenue grew 7 percent YoY to $13.3 billion. Cloud services revenue was up 21 percent YoY to $5.6 billion. Oracle also gained in cloud licence and on-premise licence revenues, which was up 7 percent at $870 million.

Catz shared that cloud services have become Oracle's largest business, both in terms of operating income and earnings per share growth accelerated.

Expanding cloud regions

Oracle currently has 162 cloud data centres in operation and under construction around the world. In Q1 (Oracle follows May-June fiscal year) alone, the company signed 42 additional cloud GPU contracts for a total of $3 billion.

“Our database business growth rate is increasing as a result of our multi-cloud agreements with Microsoft and Google. At the end of Q1, 7 Oracle Cloud regions were live at Microsoft with 24 more being built, and 4 Oracle Cloud regions were live at Google with 14 more being built,” Ellison had shared in a statement.

He added, “Our recently signed AWS contract was a milestone in the MultiCloud Era.  Soon customers will be able use the latest Oracle database technology from within every Hyperscaler's cloud."

Integrating AI with cloud

At CloudWorld 2024, Ellison also discussed the need for integrating AI into cloud and data security. He spoke about Oracle building autonomous or automated systems to run databases to minimise human interventions and errors.

“By 2025, we will have moved our all of applications to the autonomous database, we will be off older database. Everything will be autonomous – no human labour, no human error,” he said.

Further, most of the new cloud applications are being written on a code generator because that’s more productive and more secure, he said.

(This reporter was in Las Vegas at the invitation of Oracle)