https://seekingalpha.com/article/4178206-ibm-oracle-separating-clowns-clouds
Excerpts:
That red line you may mistake for the x-axis is Oracle’s CAPEX spending. While they have finally separated themselves from the axis in the last couple years, they’re still by far the smallest spender of the bunch. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft each spent more on CAPEX in 2017 than Oracle has in its entire history.
But more alarming for Oracle is they don’t seem to know that when they think they’re bragging about their cloud scale, they’re actually demonstrating how hopelessly far behind they are. Deploying dozens of racks a week may sound good if you don’t realize the hyper-scale clouds do orders of magnitude more every week. These kind of data points just reinforce that Oracle is falling ever further behind with every passing week.
As I keep repeating, CAPEX is both a prerequisite to play in the big boy cloud and confirmation of customer success. Both IBM and Oracle are tens of billions of dollars in cloud infrastructure CAPEX behind Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
Maybe they are reconciled to sitting at the children’s table of cloud ....
And be sure that when Amazon.com gets off Oracle (and they’re hard at work on this), they’re going to show the whole world how to do it. AWS already has a booming migration service for Oracle (and other) databases.
Both companies have acquired a number of SaaS applications, which will bolster their sense of self-worth and belonging in the cloud, but there is little to no platform leverage associated with these apps (and platform leverage = profits!!!). Meanwhile, the big clouds will leverage their platforms and move up from the infrastructure layer to take an ever larger bite out of overall IT spend, i.e. IBM and Oracle’s customer bases.
Oracle finally understands the threat cloud poses, and have aggressively responded, but don’t yet seem to have a realistic view of their prospects. Their traditional strategy of picking a verbal fight with the leader in a new market isn’t going to work when they haven’t actually spent the money to build out a cloud to back up the rhetoric. Oracle doesn’t suffer from IBM’s product development problem. They’re throwing tons of money at people in Seattle and, like a bank, making every employee a vice president. But they’re way behind, need to spend tens of billions to have a competitive global cloud infrastructure, and have a much more severe customer problem than IBM: their customers hate them.
No one is looking to electively increase their dependency on Oracle (and embracing cloud takes vendor dependency to a whole new level). Oracle has always been very aggressive on the sales side, and their desperation around cloud appears to be taking it to new heights. Gartner, who are otherwise inexplicitly upbeat about Oracle’s cloud efforts, says, “Oracle sometimes uses high-pressure sales tactics to sell its cloud IaaS offerings, including software audits or threatening to dramatically raise the cost of database licenses if the customer chooses another cloud provider.” The risk for all existing Oracle customers, as the company’s cloud ambitions collide with reality, is the company will get even more aggressive in monetizing its non-cloud installed base in order to sustain its revenue. If you think their maintenance fees and audits are bad now, just wait until they start waterboarding customers (or maybe they already do?).
Love the waterboarding line at the end. LOL, Oracle hasn't got a chance.