Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

computerworld.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 166 posts

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#31

Post by taylodl »

gaius wrote: post #24
zharia wrote: post #20

Oracle is smoking some dang strong weed if they honestly think they can compete with AWS. AWS does so well because they have a history of opening their platforms up, Oracle does the exact opposite

Yes and no. AWS has bet on cloud-means-public-cloud. Azure and Oracle are betting on hybrid: they'll sell you a private cloud that sits in your own DC that can interoperate seamlessly with their public cloud. AWS is a no-brainer if you're a greenfield, but the jury's still out on brownfield.

You, sir, know what you're talking about. The jury is definitely out on brownfield and so far Amazon doesn't seem interested in that space. Which means there's a helluva lot of market left up for grabs.

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#32

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

A lot of people have made comments on the tech. But there's another issue here: trust. How many people are going to be willing to trust Oracle with their data? They don't exactly have the best reputation, and they don't have the best track record either. And what they did to Solaris just makes it worse.

Also, Larry Ellison has a history of overselling whatever Oracle's doing, so I doubt the product will be as good as he says in any case.

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#33

Post by pfooti »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #32

A lot of people have made comments on the tech. But there's another issue here: trust. How many people are going to be willing to trust Oracle with their data? They don't exactly have the best reputation, and they don't have the best track record either. And what they did to Solaris just makes it worse. Also, Larry Ellison has a history of overselling whatever Oracle's doing, so I doubt the product will be as good as…

That is exactly what I was thinking. Oracle can do pretty decent stuff with tech as far as I have seen, but their actual direction and choices seems to embody the crassly-disgusting money squeeze corporation so much that I really don't want to do business with them. I mean, they put crapware in the consumer JRE installer. How many dollars did they get for that, versus how much negative feeling from that alone? This seems like a corporation who owns their terrible reputation, and says, "who cares? we're still rich."

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#34

Post by outside1234 »

gaius wrote: post #29
sra77 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle has one the most aggressive salesforces, they could sell combs to bald men. As long as they convince the non technical CXO teams thats all they need.

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.

The gotcha in all of this is that the brutal competition in the cloud means that there isn't the profit margin to pay for all of this glitz anymore in the business.

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#35

Post by vidarh »

gaius wrote: post #27
vidarh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2.) Amazon is internally use to being frugal, and so pricing wars are not going to hurt them. Oracle is use to charging a arm and a leg for their products. They may be used to being frugal, but that is not at all reflected in AWS pricing, which is ridiculously high across the board.

Operating infrastructure costs what it costs. Amazon are paying the same per Watt of electricity as anyone else. They are paying the same per sq foot of DC. They are famous for lowballing salaries but they do need to remain in in the ballpark at least. I don't mean this as a criticism necessarily but it is what it is and folks need to understand it.

Operating infrastructure costs what it costs, and it is a tiny fraction of what Amazon prices it at.

I make a lot of my income cutting peoples infrastructure costs by optimising their setups, and a lot of it involves moving people off AWS (I also move people onto AWS when they have needs that are actually best met there - there are lots of AWS services I love, but they are expensive) to save money. I can generally price my services at a few months worth of their savings.

Competing with AWS on price isn't the hard part. The challenge is the amount of people that either don't care, or think that AWS is cheap without having done realistic comparisons.

But for Oracle, those are exactly the type of customers they have built their entire business around selling to.

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#36

Post by yid »

mataug wrote: post #3

> Ellison showed off a new Oracle Dense Cloud IO bare metal cloud server offering that will provide developers with 36 CPU cores, 512GB of D-RAM, and 28.8TB of SSD storage. AWS isn't merely about the compute. EC2 is just part of a larger ecosystem of infrastructure services that has been built out by amazon over the past 10 years. If Oracle thinks they can beat that, then more power to them but I'm not quite convince…

> If Oracle thinks they can beat that, then more power to them but I'm not quite convinced.

Don't rule out the power of acquisitions (see: Firebase/Google, Parse/Facebook). Word on the street is that they're also throwing silly mounds of cash at cloud talent.

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#37

Post by saiya-jin »

pfooti wrote: post #33
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #32

A lot of people have made comments on the tech. But there's another issue here: trust. How many people are going to be willing to trust Oracle with their data? They don't exactly have the best reputation, and they don't have the best track record either. And what they did to Solaris just makes it worse. Also, Larry Ellison has a history of overselling whatever Oracle's doing, so I doubt the product will be as good as…

That is exactly what I was thinking. Oracle can do pretty decent stuff with tech as far as I have seen, but their actual direction and choices seems to embody the crassly-disgusting money squeeze corporation so much that I really don't want to do business with them. I mean, they put crapware in the consumer JRE installer. How many dollars did they get for that, versus how much negative feeling from that alone? This s…

there is no attempt to disguise anything - Oracle is your typical stock evil corp, full package. they are pretty damn consistent about it too. they have couple of decent products that they evolve as little as necessary to maintain position, but everything else about them is a big no-no.

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#38

Post by geodel »

coredog64 wrote: post #23
davidgerard wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What customers are actually actively seeking to have a closer relationship with Oracle? The people who sign the cheques and listen to their salespeople.

My favorite memory from a former employer was eavesdropping on a call between our CIO and our Oracle representative. Oracle had told us we only needed to pay for production environments. Then, during a license audit, they claimed never to have said that and wanted to charge for all environments. I never got to hear the Oracle rep's side of the phone conversation, but everyone within 50 feet of the CIO's office got to…

Good that it was possible for CIO throw away Oracle dependency just like that. Normally Oracle replacement with alternatives in big companies would be in order of decade not months or years. In those kind of places Oracle people would treat these threats as routine business discussion.

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#39

Post by bradleyjg »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #32

A lot of people have made comments on the tech. But there's another issue here: trust. How many people are going to be willing to trust Oracle with their data? They don't exactly have the best reputation, and they don't have the best track record either. And what they did to Solaris just makes it worse. Also, Larry Ellison has a history of overselling whatever Oracle's doing, so I doubt the product will be as good as…

Forget data, I wouldn't want to do business with them period. Outside of some stories about investment banks I've never heard of any other company so openly out to screw their customers.

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#40

Post by jdcarter »

paragpatelone wrote: post #6

Oracle is not going to win, not matter what they do. Oracle is built on selling costly products and services versus operating in a low margin environment. 1.) Amazon has a much higher bar for hiring talent, than Oracle does. 2.) Amazon is internally use to being frugal, and so pricing wars are not going to hurt them. Oracle is use to charging a arm and a leg for their products. 3.) Amazon shareholders are already use…

On 3) have you looked at the profitability of AWS? It's ridiculously profitable. I just checked their latest 10K, and I see for 2015 their total AWS numbers were $1.9B operating income on $7.9B revenue with 70% year over year revenue growth.
Post reply on HN