2018, the year of the Cloud underdog Oracle?

“Without data you’re just another person with an opinion.” – W. Edwards Deming

Let us see, based on data, why the Cloud underdog Oracle can be the winner of 2018 and beyond. Especially, for databases in the Cloud!

Let us check out the most recent data coming from Forrester, Gartner, Forbes and Accenture:

1. Enterprise Workloads Meet the Cloud (Accenture)

“Simply put, an enterprise system consists of an application and the underlying database and infrastructure. Regardless of whether the solution in on-premises or delivered ‘as a service’ the application relies on those two components. Thus, the performance, uptime and security of an application will depend on how well the infrastructure and databases support those attributes.”

Both Figure 1 and Figure 2 show impressive results: the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure allows more than 3000 transactions per second while the leading cloud provider cannot even reach 400. Even the old Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Classic is at 1300 transactions per second.

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure latency averages at 0.168ms while the leading cloud providers have about 6 times higher latency in average: 0.962ms.

“Armed with these insights, companies should be ready to consider moving their Oracle mission critical workloads to the Oracle Cloud—and reaping the benefits of greater flexibility and more manageable costs.”

2. The Total Economic Impact Of Oracle Java Cloud Service (Forrester)

Let us move to the Java Cloud Service and check the new Forrester Reserch

The costs and benefits for a composite organization with 30 Java developers, based on customer interviews, are:
– Investment costs: $827,384.
– Total benefits: $3,360,871.
– Net cost savings and benefits: $2,533,488.

The composite organization analysis points to benefits of $1,120,290 per year versus investment costs of $275,794, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $2,533,488 over three years. With Java Cloud Service, developers gained valuable time with near instant development instances and were finally able to provide continuous delivery with applications and functionality for the organization.

3. Market Share Analysis: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide (Gartner)

Table 2, PaaS Public Cloud Service Market Share, 2015-2016 (Millions of U.S. Dollars), ranking by Annual Growth Rate 2016:

1. Oracle 166.9%
2. Amazon 109.1%
3. Alibaba 99.0%
4. Microsoft 46.4%
5. Salesforce 40.2%

Table 3. SaaS Public Cloud Service Market Share, 2015-2016 (Millions of U.S. Dollars), ranking by Annual Growth Rate 2016 (Forrester):

1. Oracle 71.6%
2. Workday 38.8%
3. Dropbox 38.0%
4. Google 37.9%
5. Microsoft 32.6%

4. Oracle And Its Cloud Business Are In Great Shape–And Here Are 10 Reasons Why (Forbes)

For its fiscal Q2 ending Nov. 30, Oracle reported total cloud revenue of $1.5 billion, up 44%, including SaaS revenue of $1.1 billion, up 55%. The combined revenue for cloud and on-premise software was up 9% to $7.8 billion.

Oracle’s Q3 guidance offered growth rates extremely close to those recently posted by salesforce.com: when you add in the highly nontrivial fact that that same company with the $6-billion cloud business also has a $33-billion on-premises business and has rewritten every single bit of that IP for the cloud, with complete compatibility for customers taking the hybrid approach—and the percentage of customers taking the hybrid approach will be somewhere between 98.4% and 100%.

5. Oracle’s Larry Ellison Challenges Amazon, Salesforce And Workday On The Future Of The Cloud (Forbes):

While Salesforce.com’s current SaaS revenue of more than $10 billion is much larger than Oracle’s current SaaS revenue—for the three months ended Aug. 31, Oracle posted SaaS revenue of $1.1 billion—Oracle’s bringing in new SaaS customers and revenue much faster than Salesforce.

The following quote is rather interesting: “Since Larry Ellison has spent the past 40 years competing brashly against and beating rivals large and small, it wasn’t a huge shock to hear him recently rail about how cloud archrival Amazon “has no expertise in database.” But it was a shocker to hear Ellison go on to say that “Amazon runs their entire operation on Oracle [Database]…. They paid us $60 million last year in [database] support and license! And you know who’s not on Amazon? Amazon is not on Amazon.”

And finally, the topic of In-Memory databases is quite hot. Several database brands have their IMDB. A picture is worth a thousand words: