Dive Brief:
- Uber extended its ongoing partnership with Google Cloud and selected Oracle to provide additional cloud services, according to two separate announcements Monday.
- The deals will let the rideshare company retire its on-prem data centers in the next few years, Kamran Zargahi, Uber’s senior director of technology strategy, told The Wall Street Journal Monday. Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
- The choice of two providers is a “classic multicloud use case, where best-in-class capabilities from multiple cloud providers are being leveraged,” Sid Nag, VP analyst at consulting firm Gartner, told CIO Dive in an email. “Google mapping service for vehicle routing and Oracle’s cloud-based ERP and database.”
Dive Insight:
A digital disruption pioneer, Uber had yet to commit to cloud.
The company wrestled with technology debt, manual workloads and demanding on-prem systems, according to an Uber engineering September Blog post. “Our server fleet was growing rapidly and our tooling and teams weren’t able to keep up,” the post said.
In response, Uber pursued a hybrid multivendor strategy that would give IT the ability to “leverage cloud server capacity across multiple providers,” Uber said.
The Google Cloud deal provides Uber with access to infrastructure, AI, analytics and edge networking, according to Google. Initial plans include architecture modernization and making use of Google’s Ads and Maps Platform, the release said.
In addition, Uber will be able to rapidly scale and optimize its data operations through Cloud Spanner, Google said.
Scalability, optimization and efficiency are three key migration motivators for companies. “As a service” features also provide spending flexibility, an advantage in times of economic uncertainty.
The deals deliver hyperscale capabilities for Uber, alongside improved operational efficiency and cost-cutting, Nag said. “It was time for Uber to do this as opposed to running their operations in their own private data centers.”
The impact of recent supply chain disruptions, which made it difficult for many companies to build out on-prem data centers, is another factor that may have influenced the timing of Uber’s pivot to cloud, Nag said.
The Oracle deal aims to “maximize innovation while reducing overall infrastructure costs” as Uber “accelerates its path toward profitability,” the Oracle release said. Uber posted a modest $595 million quarterly net income in the period ending Dec. 31, a bright spot in a year that ended with $9.1 billion in losses, according to the company’s Wednesday earnings report.
Currently, Oracle trails the three hyperscalers, which control 77% of the U.S. cloud infrastructure market, according to recent analysis by Synergy Research Group. Google Cloud, the smallest of the biggest three cloud providers, has 11% of the market and Oracle a 2% share, according to John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group.
