Oracle’s Cloudy Future

Oracle's main money maker is their database product. Running on prem, collecting money through license and maintenance contracts. The more DB installs out there, the better.

Salesforce uses Oracle for their backend. But here's the rub - as a SFDC customer, I do not care which DB is running below it. And I don't need an DB in itself anymore. I have my customer data in my CRM, and runs in SFDC datacenters. SFDC is the largest known user of Oracle DB, but it is abstracting away the raw DB product from enterprise users. Like any other SaaS product does.

Which means the total number of ORA DBs will shrink, massively. Hence Oracle buying business apps left and right with all that DB money, to augment the sellable stack. Oracle is the elephant graveyeard of enterprise software, in CRM alone they acquired 5-6 different solutions and still sell a bunch of those (Siebel, Oracle CRM, Oracle OnDemand, Fusion, Peoplesoft, etc.).

SFDC has announced a big move onto AWS, getting away from running their own datacenters - they're moving upstream, going after the business end users. The underlying tech is a commodity, plumbing, invisible.

And what happens to price points of commodities? bye bye fat margin DB business...

The conclusion I come to is that Amazon must be eating away at their customer base. Once a customer starts to move some of their IT into AWS, and it goes well, that puts Oracle on the defensive--not a spot they like to be in.

I doubt Oracle really wants to be in the IaaS business just for the sake of IaaS. They want to focus on higher-margin services. The IaaS part must be a defensive move to keep customers away from AWS and within the Oracle ecosystem.

As the article mentions, Oracle aims primarily at its own installed-base, which limits how much "innovation" they can do .. can't piss-off the paying customers! Their world-view is incredibly narrow ... years ago they discovered that even though they have millions of paying customers, there is a core of only about 5000 customers that they really need to listen to.

Oracle should look carefully at IBM's recent moves within the Cloud eco-system: instead of offering the AWS-style "everything-including-the-kitchen-sink", IBM's purchase of 'The Weather Network's big-data division has lead them to offer high-level cloud-APIs for dealing with weather data without the need to put it all together (S3+SQS+DynamoDB+EMR...)

Well, yes and no. IMS was developed for bill-of-materials processing, which is a kind of thing you do in engineering to keep track of all the parts in your thing you're building. It was first used for the Saturn V rocket. At or at least near the top level you would have things like "a booster" and at the bottom level you would have something like "a bolt", "a nut", "a washer". There was no conceivable case in which you'd want to make a bolt out of boosters so having these relationships pre-determined wasn't actually a "limitation" at all, in the sense that it would never, ever stop a user of the system doing what they needed to do with it.

Secondly, queries analyzing the children of different parents are impractical: you would need to traverse the hierarchy to retrieve information for every potential item

The sort of query you'd do with this system would be, I want to make a rocket engine, what exactly do I need to order and how many of them, I want to give this piece of the work to this group, do they have all the parts they need in their inventory, and so on and so on. So that's not really an unreasonable sort of query if you are managing an inventory of parts and the processes that make them into ever bigger parts until finally you have your very top level parent "a moon mission".