It’s no secret that Larry Ellison, in his quest for continued database domination, has had a mercurial demeanor when dealing with the rapidly changing competitive dynamics. And he’s no fan of how quickly AWS and Google have established significant market share in the public cloud space. Pestering thoughts have led to his erratic behavior in how to best manage through the ecosystem where increasing pressure is being felt by all those inept at the cloud chess match.
Recently, the company laid off hundreds of staff related to its cloud operations in its Seattle office and the amount is expected to increase surpassing a thousand. With the departure of Thomas Kurian (who is now the new Google Cloud CEO) from Oracle after 22 years at the company, there is a void in understanding how to manage the cloud professionals which were previously under his direction.
For years, Larry Ellison and Thomas were reportedly having strong disagreements on the right direction of Oracle’s cloud efforts. And these disagreements led to a strategy, which lacked cohesion and ultimately infighting between the Seattle and Bay Area cloud professionals. Now with Kurian at Google, Oracle has had to rethink and move quickly.
On June 5, 2019, Oracle and Microsoft announced that they reached an agreement to make their two cloud computing services work together with high-speed links between their data centers, which is a major move to allay the possibilities for large enterprise clients to leave for Amazon Web Services.
“With Oracle’s enterprise expertise, this alliance is a natural choice for us as we help our joint customers accelerate the migration of enterprise applications and databases to the public cloud,” Microsoft’s cloud chief Scott Guthrie said in a statement.
Without the ability to fully develop a top grade cloud offering, Oracle sought out a partner and perhaps the best partner possible based on Microsoft’s track record with expanding its Azure business.
“With this alliance, our joint customers can migrate their entire set of existing applications to the cloud without having to re-architect anything, preserving the large investments they have already made,” Don Johnson, executive vice president of Oracle’s cloud infrastructure unit, said in a statement.
The partnership agreement is a bold move, which was executed with speed, but more likely the planning had been going on for some time. Perhaps to outside observers Ellison is erratic but for those on the inside, he is the consummate maestro.
