Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I delve into the emerging hyperscaler debate, contrasting Oracle’s service-centric cloud strategy with Google Cloud’s forward-looking, data-driven platform vision.
Highlights
00:13 — Recently, I tried to initiate a conversation with hyperscalers (Google Cloud, Oracle, Microsoft, AWS): What is the heart of the value that customers want now? How do you stand out competitively from the other hyperscalers. First, Oracle. Google Cloud has now said, “We think that that framing of the idea by Oracle is stuck in the past. And we . . . are thinking about the future.”
01:27 — So let me explain what we heard from Google Cloud, and it was their Chief Technology Officer, Will Grannis, who shared some thoughts via email. He said that the approach from Oracle of counting services and deployment options feels like a metric from a bygone era. He said that approach from Oracle is about consolidation rather than innovation.
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02:12 — I don’t think there’s any looking for any right or wrong answer here. Business leaders today are being asked to make significant decisions about which technology partners they’re going to go with. And this isn’t to try to determine who has the best HR applications or the best ERP right? This is about the future of the businesses that those executives lead.
03:28 — My intent here was to ask each of the four hyperscalers: Where do you stand on this? What would you like to have CEOs and boards of directors and C-suites think about — why should I go with any of those individual hyperscaler companies? So we heard some from Oracle. We’ve got this new input from Google Cloud. AWS declined to reply. So we’ll keep the door open.
04:19 — But I think this is an important conversation to be had, and we’re going to sort of follow this up and keep trying to understand more fully and explain from these hyperscalers, four of the most powerful companies in the world right now.
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