Oct 1st, 2009 |
So Larry Ellison took the opportunity at a recent presentation to go off on a rant about cloud computing. He basically thinks it baloney.
His points (such as they are, when you pull away the Valley girl inflection he ascribes to a cloud computing advocate) are these:
- Salesforce and Netsuite have been around almost ten years, and Oracle’s world hasn’t come to an end. (So I guess we are supposed to conclude that cloud computing doesn’t represent a future?)
- He’s tired of people saying that they have been ‘doing’ cloud computing for years. (Huh?)
Of course Ellison wants to defang cloud computing as much as possible: it is a threat. The spectre of Amazon, Google, and applications running in the cloud on top of someone else’s technology platform has got to be the largest long-term strategic threat to his business. To the degree that the enterprise wants to get away from managing their own hardware and close source software — and who wouldn’t if they can get security and scaling issues resolved? — that is the hard stop in Oracle’s future.
Larry Ellison is wrong. Even though many marketeers try to push on, real Cloud Computing is not only hot vapor. It is based on a number of old concepts like Grid-Computing, SaaS, SOA, depending on your point of view. Combined with new types of appliactions and community elements, the Cloud Computing paradigm will be the new face of IT. It’s not only about databases, CPUs and hardware and not just ‘the net is the computer’. Cloudcomputing is dynamic, demand-driven, usage-based, virtualized Computing. And this means - for broad parts of the Industry - no need to buy Databases, Gigabytes of RAM and Terabytes of Harddisks and countless CPUs and boxes.
To say it with @raesmaa words:
‘Why buy a cow if all you need is some milk?’
Roland
@rjudas
Just wait until Ellison hears about the Information Superhighway!
Ah, you mean the one with the brand new dinosaur lane. Hush up!
@Roland and author: I really can’t agree that Larry is off base with these comments. I believe that he isn’t suggesting that he is threatened by the cloud at all. From his perspective (and mine), cloud computing is just the re-using of other technology in a different business model. Their really is no need, in his mind, for any of the big players to be threatened by the cloud because there is still a need for their technologies. The place where they are installed is the only thing that changes. Yes, the end user doesn’t need to buy a database, but in reality they are paying for it when they pay their “utility” bill every month.
Cloud Computing is not only about reusing old technology with a new business model. It’s a paradigm shift towards the service based provision of IT Application. Along with the shift, old paradigms will lose ground. like
- ‘you need a pile of server on your premise’,
-’You need a bunch of almighty software monsters aka Databases and ERP’
and then of course you need hordes of IT Geeks and ITSM tools to take care of your pile of server and dinosaur apps.
It’s a good idea to have new concepts ready, while some big companies are invensting billions of dollars in new datacenter technology. I doubt, that Larry has the right mindset to understand this one. Or do you think the acquisition of Sun was not about Hardware and Java, but because of their cool cloud technology?
Interestingly Oracle already does offer cloud based offerings using amazon and has CRM and Collaboration available directly as SaaS
http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/cloud/index.html
I would not put too much on that rant as Oracle is already in the cloud services business.