Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said he is open to a partnership with bête noire Amazon – after Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) announced a new deal with Google that will see it offer its Oracle Database on Google Cloud.
There has been little love lost between Amazon and Oracle’s leaders and much public trolling. Back in 2018 Ellison said “it’s kind of embarrassing when Amazon uses Oracle but they want you to use Aurora and Redshift.
“They’ve had 10 years to get off Oracle, and they’re still on Oracle…”
See also: Oracle Database comes to Arm in the latest jolt to Intel
Just 12 weeks later AWS said Amazon’s consumer business was moving 97% of critical system DBs off Oracle and onto Aurora and DynamoDB by year’s end; Amazon CTO Werner Vogels posting “RIP” on what was then Twitter as that news broke. The two's executives have since shared regular digs.
Oracle meanwhile has been aggressively, if belatedly, building out its own cloud infrastructure and cementing a cosy relationship with Microsoft.
That includes a dedicated interconnect between the clouds and Oracle DBs accessible from inside Azure data centres. (Database 12.1 and higher Standard and Enterprise editions in Azure on VM images based on Oracle Linux.)
See also: Oracle declares itself a "high-growth cloud business" after record-breaking Q4
A new partnership with GCP continues the trend.
(The Oracle Database@Google Cloud proposition will let customers buy Oracle database services using existing GCP commitments and “leverage their existing Oracle license benefits including Bring Your Own License and discount programs such as Oracle Support Rewards,” the two said.)
Oracle and AWS partnership?
But pressed on whether a similar partnership with AWS was on the cards, Oracle executives took a few moments to gather their wits on a June 11 earnings call, before Ellison responded.
He told analysts: “We're thrilled to have the connection with Microsoft and be building OCI data centers inside of – right inside of – Azure so the computers are next to each other to minimize network costs and network latency, which is all good things. We're doing the same thing with Google.
“We would love to do the same thing with AWS.
"We think we should be interconnected to everybody, and that's what we're attempting to do in our multi-cloud strategy. I think that's what customers want. So, I'm optimistic that's the way the world will settle out. We'll get rid of these fees for moving data from cloud to cloud, and all the clouds will be interconnected and customers can pick their favourite service from their favorite cloud and mix and match whatever they want to use…”
Ellison emphasised that view with more of a pointed dig at AWS in 2023.
Positioning Oracle as a bastion of openness he asked: “Does it make sense that Amazon takes an open-source database like MySQL and turns it into Aurora that is not open-source? Then, this 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!'
“I mean, why would they do that? Alternatively, they can put their facilities right next to ours and we could do an interconnect like we’re doing with Microsoft,” Ellison said. “But this whole idea of taking open source and going to closed source, and saying that we won’t let customers connect to other clouds — I don’t think that’s gonna work.”
Paging new AWS CEO Matt Garman...
