Oracle has officially entered the multi-cloud era. Following its partnership with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, earlier this year, the company also teamed up with AWS to launch Oracledatabase@AWS. This service allows customers to use Oracle Autonomous Database and Exadata Database Service within AWS’ data centres.
In an interview with AIM, Mahesh Thiagarajan, executive vice president of software development at OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure), explained that Oracle’s decision to embrace multi-cloud stems from its unparalleled control over data. “Nobody holds data as much as we do,” he asserted.
Further, he said that Oracle’s strategy has always been to be more open than its counterparts. Thiagarajan revealed that back in 2017, when conducting a customer 360 analysis, Oracle found that over 60-70% of its customers had already connected to other clouds. “They were using OCI but were already connected to other clouds,” he said.
In his keynote speech at Oracle CloudWorld 2024, CTO Larry Ellison shared his vision for the future of cloud services: “We’re entering a new phase where services on different clouds work together gracefully. The clouds are becoming open; they’re no longer walled gardens. Customers will have choices and can use multiple clouds.”
Thiagarajan said that one of the largest telecom providers, Vodafone, and one of the largest fintech firms, Voya Financial Services, are currently using Oracle’s multi-cloud services. He shared a common trend among Oracle customers, which is their increasing demand for more compute. “They are hungry for GPUs and they just want massive GPU clusters that allow them to deploy models that serve all other use cases,” he said.
Oracle recently introduced new distributed cloud innovations in OCI to meet the growing demand for AI and cloud services. These include Oracle Database@AWS, Oracle Database@Azure, Oracle Database@Google Cloud, OCI Dedicated Region, and OCI Supercluster, giving customers the flexibility to deploy OCI services at the edge, across clouds, or in the public cloud.
Oracle Cloud now operates in 85 regions globally, with plans to add 77 more, making it available in more locations than any other hyperscaler.
On top of that, Oracle recently announced the launch of the world’s first zettascale cloud computing clusters. Powered by NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, this cluster offers up to 131,072 GPUs and delivers 2.4 zettaFLOPS of peak performance. “We are among the first few cloud providers to have Blackwell up and running,” Thiagarajan said.
He went on to mention that NVIDIA plays a critical role by powering Oracle’s hardware and software applications. At the same time, the latter is contributing to the former’s sovereign AI mission.
Speaking about India, Thiagarajan said it has multiple data centres in Mumbai and Hyderabad and are continuing to expand. “We see great demand from various communities, including startups and enterprises, and we’re consistently opening new data centres,” he said.
Cheaper Cloud
Ellison is confident in Oracle’s networking technology, RDMA. “Our clouds are more automated, so we have very low labour costs. Besides, our networks are much more efficient, and the RDMA networks run much faster. If you run twice as fast, our costs go down by half,” he said.
“Also, our networks are much faster than the other clouds. So, as we scale, we believe our potential to deliver much better margins than we’re currently delivering gets very real,” he added.
Similarly, Thiagarajan said that Oracle’s operations are efficient due to automation, which requires fewer people to manage its services. This helps reduce overhead costs. “The real question is not how much we charge, but how efficiently we manage costs through automation and smart service operation,” he said.
Oracle chief Safra Catz said that multi-cloud agreements (partnerships with other cloud providers) will help increase Oracle’s profitability.
What’s Next?
Oracle’s cloud services revenue surged 21% in USD and 22% in constant currency to $5.6 billion in Q1 2025, driven by gains in cloud infrastructure and applications.
Despite this growth, Oracle still lags behind its competitors. In the latest quarter, Amazon Web Services (AWS) generated $27.5 billion in revenue, marking a 19% increase from the previous year. Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud revenue reached $24.1 billion, a 20% rise, while Google Cloud saw a 35% jump, reaching $11.4 billion.
However, Oracle remains confident that its innovations will help it stand out against rivals like Azure and Google Cloud Platform. “What is clear is that Oracle will continue to kill the market,” said Thiagarajan, citing strong customer satisfaction, industry feedback, and robust earnings as proof of the company’s momentum.
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