Dive Brief:
- Larry Ellison, executive chairman and chief technology officer of Oracle, announced plans to heavily challenge Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the Infrastructure as a Service space during his keynote address at OpenWorld in San Francisco Sunday night. "Amazon's lead is over," Ellison said, according to reports from USA Today and ZDnet. "Amazon is going to have serious competition going forward."
- Ellison made the challenge as he introduced his company’s second generation IaaS data centers, Oracle Ravello Cloud Service, Oracle Container Cloud Service and several enhancements to existing Oracle IaaS offerings.
- The second generation IaaS data centers offer twice the memory of AWS memory, four times the storage and 10 times the input-output capacity, according to Ellison.
Dive Insight:
Oracle may have an uphill battle ahead. According to Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant report about cloud IaaS released in August, Oracle barely registers in the cloud IaaS market. Oracle's IaaS was not included in Gartner's report because its cloud computing service was not generally available during the evaluation and it did not have enough market share to "qualify for inclusion" in the report.
Gartner rated AWS and Microsoft Azure as the only two cloud "leaders" in its IaaS providers ranking. On top of that, Synergy Research says AWS is now three times the size of its closest competitor.
Oracle's IaaS business is growing, but slowly. Oracle IaaS grew just 10% in the first quarter of 2016 compared to the year prior. But Oracle is putting a stake in the ground with its new IaaS data centers. It’s is also focusing on making cloud more secure. On Monday, Oracle announced that it signed an agreement to acquire Palerra, which will enable it to offer identity and security cloud services.
The opportunity for cloud computing is huge, however, with room for several "winners" if projections pan out. Forrester Research recently said the cloud market will be worth $64 billion by 2020.
