Bullseye On Oracle: Amazon, Microsoft And SAP’s Quest to Steal Larry Ellison’s Database Customers

(Note: After an award-winning career in the media business covering the tech industry, Bob Evans was VP of Strategic Communications at SAP in 2011, and Chief Communications Officer at Oracle from 2012 to 2016. He now runs his own firm, Evans Strategic Communications LLC.)

For the past 20 years, Oracle databases have played major roles in running the world’s businesses: banking systems, airline-reservation systems, retail operations, telecom billing, government agencies, global supply chains, procurement systems, and more.

That database revenue accounts for about half of Oracle’s $37 billion annual revenue, according to analysts’ estimates, and during the good old “on-premise” days before cloud computing became all the rage, Oracle had built a near-impregnable moat around that massive database and workload revenue.

But the cloud is changing everything, and it is certainly shattering Oracle’s aura of invincibility in supplying the databases and related workloads that have become fundamental elements of the global economy.

So it is that in today’s cloud-first business environment, Oracle’s lean and hungry arch-competitors Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and SAP are all deeply committed to exploiting that cloud transformation to end Oracle’s near-hegemony in the database marketplace.

Amazon’s even gone so far as to name one of its databases Redshift, a term originally associated with astronomical observations but that might become far more widely known in the business realm for AWS’s obsession with aggressively stripping market share away from Big Red Oracle.

But given Oracle’s incredible lead as the incumbent, how do we know that Amazon and Microsoft and SAP aren’t just engaged in a lot of noisy but ultimately insignificant ankle-biting? Well, consider these facts:

• Microsoft recently surpassed Oracle—for the first time ever—as the world’s best on-premise Operational Database System as ranked by Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for both execution and vision, according to Microsoft EVP Scott Guthrie, speaking at an investor conference late last year. So if Microsoft can match or surpass Oracle’s database quality and performance on-premise with SQL 2016, that’s a huge reassurance for customers looking to expand as well into the cloud.
• And how’s Microsoft’s Azure database doing in the cloud? At that same event, EVP Guthrie said Microsoft is now hosting “about 1.6 million production [Azure] databases”—and that statistic is from several months ago, and is likely much higher now.
• Guthrie also claimed Microsoft Azure is gaining traction among Oracle customers because not only can it match Oracle’s performance, but also because “from a TCO perspective, customers can run at about 11.7 times cheaper than the equivalent Oracle solution.” Even if some customers can only reach 25% of that cost differential, that’s still 2.9x cheaper.
• AWS’s Aurora database is “the fastest-growing service in the history of AWS,” said CEO Andy Jassy in describing Aurora and Redshift, his pair of Oracle database alternatives, in a CNBC.com article.
• As rising numbers of SAP customers replace some of their Oracle databases with SAP’s own HANA database, the company has begun to see “materially lower costs” due to declining license fees it must pay to “third parties”—and Oracle’s certainly at the top of that list of unidentified suppliers getting squeezed out by SAP. That nugget was disclosed a few months ago by CFO Luka Mucic at SAP’s Capital Markets Day event on Wall Street.

Of course, it would be foolish to conflate desire with achievement, and just because Amazon and Microsoft and SAP are all on the hunt for Oracle Database customers doesn’t mean they’re going to succeed. But with the surge to the cloud gathering huge momentum, and with those 3 powerful enterprise-tech companies creating high-performance products and offering them at compelling prices, the pressure on Oracle to maintain its database leadership is more intense than ever before.

At Oracle, the database products and strategy hold special places in Ellison’s mind and heart, and not just because they account for about half of the company’s revenue. They’re special also because they have been the products that put Oracle on the map, that are responsible for the company’s remarkable success, and that made it possible for Oracle to expand into middleware, applications, and hardware.

And Ellison, as intensely competitive a person as has ever walked the Earth, has predictably pooh-poohed and will certainly continue to dismiss those competitors’ lusty claims as barely worth addressing because, he has said and will continue to say, the AWS databases can’t handle the world’s biggest workloads, and Azure was made for the mid-market, and HANA is just a figment of SAP’s imagination and doesn’t really exist.

True to his combative nature, Ellison even contended that AWS’s database efforts will never amount to much not only because Aurora and Redshift can’t hold a candle to the Oracle Database, but also because Oracle’s IaaS technology—which barely exists yet!—is so superior to Amazon’s infrastructure technology (you know, the one that’s generated about 50 times more revenue than Oracle IaaS) that AWS simply doesn’t have the computing muscle to handle the world’s largest workloads.

During Oracle’s March 15 earnings call, Ellison said it is “impossible” to run massive and complex databases on AWS, further claiming that AWS is limited to running “only small Oracle databases in the cloud.” (Oracle will release earnings results for Q4 and its fiscal year on June 21.)

Amazon, of course, bitterly contested Oracle’s claims in a variety of forums, including this blog post from AWS data-center chief James Hamilton.

Ellison went on to assert that his database performance can crush that of AWS in not only performance but also price: “Many Oracle workloads now run 10 times faster in the Oracle cloud versus the Amazon cloud,” he said. “It also costs less to run Oracle workloads in the Oracle cloud than the Amazon cloud.”

(As for that pricing disparity, some observers claim that the 10:1 pricing advantage touted by Ellison is more the result of manipulating contractual terms rather than superior technology.)

But while some or even all of Ellison’s putdowns of competitive databases might have at some point been true, they are surely not all true now—and business customers are becoming increasingly willing to go with the alternatives.

Microsoft EVP Guthrie and AWS CEO Jassy both say those customers have lots of reasons to move away from Oracle—not only because the new wave of competing products is better, but also because Oracle has, over the years, extracted more than its pound of flesh from database customers who for a long time had no viable alternatives to turn to.

From the CNBC article on AWS cited above: "People are very sensitive about being locked in given the experience they've had the last 10 to 15 years," Jassy said on Wednesday on stage at Amazon's AWS Summit in San Francisco. "When you look at cloud, it's nothing like being locked into Oracle”…. He specifically went after Oracle's core database business, saying that "over the last few decades, it has been a lonely place for customers" because of the high prices and vendor lock-in. "Customers are sick of it," he said.

Guthrie put it this way during his Q&A session at the investor conference: “And so that's put us in a very nice place where we can go to pretty much every organization out there right now that's feeling, frankly, some angst about Oracle price increases, and be able to say, "we can give you more value, we can give you a lot more capability, and we can do it at one-tenth the price…. And those tier one database takeouts, they take long. So they're not like a quick one-week conversation, but when they do happen they're really, really big wins. And I think we've got a good motion and we're seeing some good traction in the market versus Oracle, in particular in the database space.”

What’s even more exciting from Guthrie’s perspective is that the move of databases from on-premise to the cloud won’t just be a one-for-one swap of existing share—rather, the use of cloud technology for databases has been opening up entirely new use cases for customers, he said.

“Some of the scenarios that we see in use on Azure today?” Guthrie asked at the event. “Three years ago, they would have sounded like science fiction, whether it's fraud detection, whether it's hedge funds doing quant analysis in terms of portfolio, bursting, or whether it's around manufacturing scenarios like predictive maintenance for equipment—these are things you never think of as ‘IT,’ or at least I wouldn't have thought of, and I think that's the exciting part…. We’re at the very beginning of a very long journey and it's going to be an exciting journey in terms of the net new use-cases that we can enable.”

Larry Ellison would certainly agree that the journey to the cloud—and in particular, the movement of massive, mission-critical databases and workloads to the cloud—is only just beginning. And by his reckoning, Oracle’s advantage of incumbency, combined with what he believes will be breakthrough new technology in both PaaS (database) and IaaS, means the long-game advantage goes to Oracle.

Here’s Ellison again from the March 15 earnings call: “We have hundreds of thousands of database customers and we have millions and millions of applications that run on the Oracle database,” Ellison said in reply to an analyst’s question. “Most of those customers will move most of their databases and most of these workloads to the cloud. And right now we have a huge technology lead over both Amazon and Microsoft Azure with our new Generation 2 infrastructure as a service….

“How long does it take to migrate several hundred thousand customers and several million databases to the Oracle cloud? I think the rate of migration is going to accelerate over the years, but it's going to be at least a five-year run of very, very rapid growth as our database business begins to move,” Ellison said.

He later added, “Again, my estimate is that the majority [of the Oracle database business] will move [to the cloud] over the next five years and that's going to give us enormous growth rates over that five-year period.”

Ellison made it clear that whatever cutting-out expeditions Microsoft and Amazon and SAP choose to make among Oracle’s customers, he and Oracle have no intention of conceding anything to anybody at any time. “Some of our largest customers are negotiating huge infrastructure-as-a-service contracts to move all their databases to the Oracle Cloud,” Ellison said on the earnings call, promising that details would be announced in “the coming weeks.”

One of those megadeals was announced on May 4, when AT&T said it would move “thousands of large-scale internal databases” to Oracle’s Infrastructure and Platform as a Service.

So, there’s no doubt that one of the four database powerhouses will be enjoying those “enormous growth rates over that five-year period” that Ellison discussed, but while Ellison insists it will be his company, Amazon and Microsoft and SAP are betting on some very different outcomes.

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This article originally appeared on Forbes.