121–130 of 166 posts
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They just picked up a guy I know who has no cloud experience for a bundle of money. Seems like a bunch of people around seattle are getting the mounds of cash.
What if I needed an intro to this guy of yours? (simone dot brunozzi @ gmail)
Knowing what we do about Oracle's licensing practices and how their sales people are basically just loan sharks that will take your kneecaps out if you don't pay their extortion fees, why would you ever want to put your entire operation in their hands? I would assume they'd have no issue cutting you off from your entire infrastructure at the drop of a hat if there was a billing dispute.
For example, I'd prefer to run Debian instead of RHEL, but since the stack I have to support uses Oracle and Websphere, my hands are tied.
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Beating AWS on price is trivial, though. If you can't beat AWS on price, you have no business starting a cloud service. So it's a question whether they think they need to beat AWS on price or not. AWS pricing certainly makes it very clear that Amazon have no interest or need to compete on price - a lot of the cloud market is extremely price insensitive. It's a curious effect that seems to be largely down to businesse…
If beating AWS on price is trivial, why is nobody doing that to beat them? The only place I have a gripe on AWS pricing is bandwidth. I keep waiting for the announcement that bandwidth is being cut in half next month and it hasn't happened. I've done the datacenter thing many times and there are so many pieces to the costs of running your own that most people don't include. The biggest one is just plain agility. Pred…
They have a huge suite of offerings, good reputation, huge amount of third party tooling, and the services themselves are somewhat sticky.
By that I mean, I could probably switch over to your cheaper cloud service. It would mean having my engineers go through and build stuff to fill in the gaps or transition away from things that are very AWS specific.
Or I could just pay a bit more money and keep developing features as AWS isn't too expensive and does what I need.
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I attended an Oracle sales conference once (for the canapes, very good) and happened to be in the auditorium for one of the speakers. There were lasers. There was dry ice. Vanessa Mae was playing the electric violin. A director on stage bellowed we will bring $competitor TO THEIR KNEES! Everyone was on their feet cheering, I've been to metal gigs that were less intense. Oracle takes sales very, very seriously.
Granted. It's just that to my ears, Larry Ellison's announcement scores the wrong check marks: bluster: check hubris: check realism: nope I would have expected that someone who takes marketing very, very seriously tries to sound realistic, not overoptimistic or full of that which makes plants grow. Saying "oracle's database rocks" and asking for a stiff price has a certain touch of realism. I can see how a good sales…
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You must not work in Fortune 500 IT. Dear God how they love to shovel money at Larry Ellison. Trust? Let me tell you about the CIO's who distrust any data storage that ISN'T Oracle.
I agree with you but this isn't data storage. For those Fortune 500 companies who've made the shift to cloud services Amazon currently fills the role that Oracle does in data storage. I'm sure there's plenty of Fortune 500 CIOs who are still hesitant to embrace the cloud in general, but If there's a CIO out there who's moving some services to the cloud going with Oracle over Amazon just because its Oracle then they'r…
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No, I think Oracle is targeting a different market because to them it is a low hanging fruit. AWS got a lot of startups and tech savvy companies (like Netflix). If I were Oracle I would target existing customers, who generally are not the tech savvy darlings (think Procter & Gamble, health companies, food companies, banks...) who can now tell their board their on-site Oracle licences have been moved to the cloud. It'…
...and here is how that is going to play out. We're a large public sector customer. As part of our last ELA renewal (which was an effing effing nightmare over vmware licensing) we got this crapload of Oracle cloud products that we didn't really want or need, database cloud, process cloud, integration cloud, on and on. I think there must have been a mandate from Mark Hurd to the effect that "There will be cloud produc…
Oracle allows licensing on VMware on a hypervisor level. When VMware allowed you to vMotion between hosts in a vSphere HA cluster, Oracle would require that you license all the hosts in the cluster because the Oracle VMs might land on any of those hosts in a failover situation. When cross-cluster vMotion came with 5.1, the customer was told that they must license every host attached to that vCenter instance, forcing the customer to purchase and implement another vCenter strictly for Oracle.
And now, with vSphere 6, comes cross-vCenter vMotion. You can guess where that conversation with Oracle went. Customer bought an Oracle Enterprise license, which is presumably what the sales rep had in mind the whole time.
Even without that, there are enough potential shops whom run Oracle DBMS / J2EE stacks whom would gladly pay for managed well-managed, -secured IaaS/PaaS offerings. Throw in Solaris (cloudified similarly to SmartOS), SAN storage and enterprise folks will sit up and take notice. It just seems sort of late to the party and HP already made a go it. Such an offering must be demonstrably optimized for segment(s) (competing head-on with the commodification of AWS would be pointless) and sales/migration prof svcs efforts must actively hustle customers to switch with provable TCO savings and operational agility. PS: I did such with a consulting team early on to bring enterprise folks onto AWS with hard-core financial and other high-importance apps. Folks may not realize how generally well-managed and physically-secured are AWS customer-facing boxes. Amazon has deep pockets, massive scale, category-defining experience, many complementary offerings, first-mover advantage and brand recognition.
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They just picked up a guy I know who has no cloud experience for a bundle of money. Seems like a bunch of people around seattle are getting the mounds of cash.
What if I needed an intro to this guy of yours? (simone dot brunozzi @ gmail)
What will ultimately determine it's success is adoption and not the technology potential itself. Let's see what happens it'll be interesting to observe the impact of this.