Why Oracle Thinks It Can Beat Amazon at Cloud

Oracle’s new cloud database service – which company CTO and co-founder Larry Ellison used to take a couple of swipes at Amazon Web Services in his first keynote at this week’s Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco – was one product inside a barrage of new cloud features the company rolled out at the show.

Catching up to the biggest players in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service space in terms of features is one of the things Oracle has to do to compete. But it also places a lot of focus on performance of its cloud platform and stresses its familiarity with traditional enterprise workloads – a kind of legacy AWS cannot claim and a fact Oracle is leveraging to win enterprise business.

“Running mission critical workloads for decades gives us a really good advantage in really understanding these complex applications,” Kash Iftikhar, VP for IaaS in Oracle’s Public Cloud Services unit, told Data Center Knowledge in an interview on the sidelines of OpenWorld 2017. “We are able to translate those requirements, I believe, in a much more specific manner. From a solution perspective, we understand very clearly what we need to do better than other providers.”

That, combined with high performance, aggressive pricing, and lots of features essentially represents the pillars of Oracle’s strategy for beating rivals in the enterprise infrastructure cloud market – a market Iftikhar, like many others in the space, feels is still largely untapped. Yes, Oracle got into the IaaS space much later than AWS, Microsoft, and even Google, but if the claims that there is so much potential market share still unspoken for are true, it’s not clear at all that today’s leaders will stay in the lead.

“Starting late actually really helped us,” Iftikhar said. “We can do a lot of things the right way. Eighty percent of the infrastructure has still not moved to the cloud. This is a long battle. From our perspective, we’re very ready for it. And we’re just starting off I guess.”

We interviewed Iftikhar about Oracle’s cloud strategy, its data center expansion plans, and the new cloud infrastructure features introduced at OpenWorld for the next episode of The Data Center Podcast, which you can stream or download below:

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