Dive Brief:
- Oracle joined AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud this year as a leading hyperscaler in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for strategic cloud platform service providers, previously the cloud infrastructure and platform services category.
- The technology company has appeared in the analyst firm’s annual cloud assessments since 2017 but rose to the leader category for the first time in this year’s report, published earlier this month. The company was classified as a visionary in 2022 and a niche player prior to that, Gartner said.
- The SCPS category encompasses public cloud infrastructure, platform and transformation services managed by the provider and robust enough to support mission-critical, large-scale production workloads, according to Gartner. It includes managed software, database and application services.
Dive Insight:
Oracle has been racing to catch up with the competition. A relatively latecomer to public cloud, the legacy tech company rapidly built capacity, expanding its data-center footprint to 66 regions and solidifying key partnerships with Nvidia, Microsoft and AI developer Cohere.
Chair and CTO Larry Ellison pledged to add 100 cloud data centers to Oracle’s network during a quarterly earnings call last week, admitting the company had billions of dollars more in contracted demand than it could supply.
The company launched cloud database services in Azure’s eastern U.S. region Wednesday as part of a broader agreement between the two hyperscalers. Oracle plans to complete 20 more deployments in Microsoft public cloud data centers over the next year.
Despite recent business expansion, Oracle’s 2% share of the cloud market is dwarfed by its three larger competitors, who jointly took in two-thirds of hyperscaler revenue in 2023’s third quarter, according to Synergy Research Group’s analysis.
Cloud, however, isn’t a zero-sum game. As long as global spending on hyperscaler services remains on an upward trajectory, Oracle can grow its business without stealing customers from other providers.
Indeed, Gartner singled out multicloud functionality and integrations with AWS and Azure as an Oracle strength in its analysis.
“Oracle’s multicloud application and data integration tools make it easier for many customers to establish Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a ‘second cloud’ adjacent to their existing primary provider,” the report said.
Gartner produces Magic Quadrant reports in more than one hundred categories. Oracle was named a leading provider in several additional areas, including cloud ERP for product-centric enterprises in November and financial software and financial close and consolidation solutions last week.
“Just three years ago, OCI was rarely, if ever, mentioned as a viable hyperscale alternative,” Oracle CEO Safra Catz said during the earnings call. “Now, more industry analysts are catching on to what customers are choosing.”
