The cloud computing market has been typically dominated by a few major players. We all know their names: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google, and increasingly, Oracle.
A report from Synergy Research Group published earlier this year stated that AWS, Microsoft, and Google held 32 percent, 23 percent, and 12 percent of the market share respectively, with Alibaba and Oracle taking fourth and fifth place.
But with so few hyperscalers claiming such massive proportions, the inevitable has happened, and anticompetitive investigations are popping up around the globe.
The UK's Competitions and Markets Authority is in the midst of an ongoing investigation in which the "big three" are doing a lot of finger-pointing at one another, arguing who is and who isn't causing problems in the market. CISPE, a trade body for European cloud providers, recently wound down its own antitrust complaint following what, arguably, amounted to little more than a payout from Microsoft.
Some (minor) efforts have been seen over the last year from hyperscalers to improve their PR in this regard. We have seen all three gradually dropping their egress fee charges to varying degrees - some with caveats of full termination of cloud contracts - but in practice, this means little to the customers which frankly are unlikely to do a dramatic sweeping exit from the cloud all at once.
There is also the undeniable fact that many customers take a "multi-cloud" approach anyway. Estimates from Hashicorp suggest that as many as three in four companies are taking a multi-cloud or hybrid approach, but the major cloud companies don't financially stand to gain from making this process easier and simpler. After all, why would they care if you have to pay twice?
During the recent Yotta conference in Las Vegas, I sat down with Kambiz Aghili, vice president of multi-cloud, Oracle, to discuss the subject further.
Oracle has in the last year launched a series of partnerships with Google, AWS, and Microsoft, including interconnect services, and the Oracle Database@ series of offerings, the latter of which actually sees Oracle hosting its servers and offering the full Oracle Cloud Infrastructure stack from inside the other hyperscalers' data centers.
This could be a very smart business move for Oracle, and one that should ultimately benefit its customers, who most likely are already using a combination of cloud services.
As Kambiz puts it, they are breaking down the "garden walls" that exist between different cloud service providers, and are making it easier for customers to use both a bit of Oracle and a bit of the other hyperscaler's services.
From Oracle's perspective, this increases the number of its availability zones significantly (it can effectively just piggyback existing zones owned by other companies), and customers not already using Oracle services may be tempted to opt for the smaller cloud provider's offerings knowing that adopting them will be simple.
Additionally, while Oracle does not claim this to be a move to avoid the scrutiny of the likes of the CMA or FCA in the US, the company says it does work closely with regulators and this apparent "sharing" attitude can only help it present itself as a believer in a free and open market as it continues to grow its own market share.
Oracle's multi-cloud offerings took some in the industry by surprise. While the company has a long-standing relationship with Microsoft - in June 2023 Google accused Oracle alongside Microsoft of anticompetitive practices to the Federal Trade Commission - such a collaborative relationship has not historically been seen with the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Larry Ellison, Oracle's founder, has a history of making disparaging remarks about AWS and the company's propensity to try and lock customers into its ecosystem. During a 2021 earnings call, he said of the cloud provider's offerings: "We don’t think an application should talk to five or six separate databases. We think it’s a very, very risky security architecture."
During that same call, Ellison added: "That’s been the big question out there - was our cloud good enough to compete with Amazon and Google and Microsoft? I think we have answered that question. It’s not only good enough to compete, in many cases, it’s much better for security, for performance, for reliability. So many people have left Amazon and gone to the Oracle Cloud because we cost less."
Ellison doubled down in 2023, describing Amazon as a very impressive company, but noting that it does not "make sense" to take "an open-source database like MySQL and turn it into Aurora that is not open-source."
He also rallied against the idea that a customer "can’t move data in and out of an AWS data center because in their mind, ‘You’ve gotta keep everything in our cloud — we own everything! — so if you want to run your database on AWS, you have to PAY us!'”
Later that year, Ellison also claimed Oracle's database was 1000x faster - likely hyperbole - than AWS' Aurora database.
When asked during the Yotta conference if there had been challenges in negotiating these deals with AWS and others, Aghili mostly avoided the question - likely for obvious reasons.
Aghili was equally non-committal regarding whether he expected the other cloud providers to explore similar multi-cloud solutions, but reiterated that he sees it as important that customers be given options, and should be able to use several cloud provider's services with ease.
Regardless of whether we see more such offerings pop up, end users will undoubtedly be pleased that they can now combine their Oracle workloads with other cloud providers with ease, reduced costs, and without feeling the dreaded weight of vendor lock-in.