. It's not even an exclusive relationship, but that doesn't stop Oracle from crowing about it at every turn. This week Ellison claimed during an online event that "the majority of Zoom meetings … happen every day in the Oracle cloud" and that Oracle is now ahead of AWS in terms of serving Zoom meetings, though he didn't refer to the competition by name.
Oracle's progress in the cloud business tends to be of the three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust variety. It botched its first iteration from a technical perspective, and after years of plugging away it still ranks in the least desirable section of Gartner's famous "magic quadrant," as measured by ability to execute and completeness of vision. Cloud cognoscenti repeatedly tell me Oracle can't catch the leaders and doesn't have the mindset to do so even if it could.
Oracle certainly is hustling. Todd McKinnon, CEO of software maker Okta, says Catz, the Oracle CEO, personally pitched him recently over a Zoom call to switch his company's business from AWS to Oracle. McKinnon hasn't committed yet, but he says he's attracted by the prospect of getting Oracle's help in selling to the larger company's broad customer list. Still, he's fixated on how relatively rudimentary Oracle's product is compared to AWS.
Oracle also is trying on an unexpected look: humility. Asked what is taking Oracle so long to catch up, its top cloud engineering executive, Clay Magouyrk, suggests Oracle understands its position in the marketplace. "Zoom didn't come to Oracle because we were their first choice. They came to us out of necessity," says Seattle-based Magouyrk, who, like many of Oracle's cloud personnel previously worked at Amazon. "This is how you build a business.
Reality may well bite Oracle hard if the TikTok transaction never materializes, a distinct possibility as it gets lost in the transition from one administration to the next. The more times
got a take, Kantrowitz?
thanks for this news