Oracle Writes the Most Stupid Article on Cloud Ever

Executive Summary

• Oracle likes to propose its cloud leadership. Yet, most of the things that Oracle writes about the cloud are either false or makes no sense.
• We will review the logic of this ridiculous article by Oracle on the cloud.

Introduction to Oracle’s Cloud Logic

Oracle knows quite a bit about databases, but increasingly we have begun to question what they actually know about the cloud. In this article, we will review an article by Oracle that should give anyone pause.

Our References for This Article

If you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.

Lack of Financial Bias Notice: The vast majority of content available on the Internet about Oracle is marketing fiddle-faddle published by Oracle, Oracle partners, or media entities paid by Oracle to run their marketing on the media website. Each one of these entities tries to hide its financial bias from readers. The article below is very different.

• This is published by a research entity, not some dishonest entity that is part of the Oracle ecosystem. 
• Second, no one paid for this article to be written, and it is not pretending to inform you while being rigged to sell you software or consulting services. Unlike nearly every other article you will find from Google on this topic, it has had no input from any company's marketing or sales department. As you are reading this article, consider how rare this is. The vast majority of information on the Internet on Oracle is provided by Oracle, which is filled with false claims and sleazy consulting companies and SAP consultants who will tell any lie for personal benefit. Furthermore, Oracle pays off all IT analysts -- who have the same concern for accuracy as Oracle. Not one of these entities will disclose their pro-Oracle financial bias to their readers. 
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Oracle’s Crazy Quotes

Evolution of the Public Cloud?

“The common perception that public clouds are the best low-cost option is false. Contrary to this view, on-demand services from public cloud providers may come at a higher premium than in-house cloud services. When you compare the unit economics of a private cloud solution using high convergence density systems, or engineered systems such as Oracle Exadata, with comparable public clouds, it becomes apparent that the private cloud is usually the lower-cost solution. Public clouds still have a long way to go before the virtuous cycle of early public cloud adopters, who help bring down the unit costs, will attract the next wave of adopters. Consider Amazon, one of the leading public cloud providers. It has reduced the price of its public cloud services 42 times in the last six years alone due to this virtuous cycle and increasing competition.”

This is a curious paragraph because everything in the quote is false.

1. While there are a few articles on unit economics that don’t explain anything about it, it is not a real term in economics. It’s a term flung around at startups.
2. A high convergence density system is also not anything. The closest things we could find to it relate to weather.
3. The statement “with comparable public clouds, it becomes apparent that the private cloud is usually the lower cost solution” is an assertion without evidence.
4. The statement that “public clouds have a long way to go before the virtuous cycle of early public cloud adopters” is directly contradicted by the sentence that follows it “(Amazon) has reduced the price of its public cloud services 42 times.”

This is one of the weakest paragraphs that we have seen written. The entire section is filled with not only false claims but with terms that have no meaning.

An Explosion of Hybrid Clouds?

“In the short to medium term, there will be an explosion in the use of true hybrid clouds driven mainly by major external trends—namely, big data, IoT, and mobility.”

Why do Big Data, IoT, and mobility drive hybrid clouds? It is not explained, and if it not obvious (and this contention is very confusing), a contention should be explained. This is another evidence-free assertion.

Public Clouds Lack Data?

“Another common perception is that the public cloud requires one to simply sign in and start benefiting from all the efficiencies. If only it were that simple. What about the integration to all the existing legacy enterprise applications? How about incorporating the enterprise data? Without the data, the application itself is of no value to organizations.

Finally, the initial fears about the security of using a public cloud are still not addressed. As long as a regional government agrees not to intervene, the data is your own; however, there are no guarantees. Microsoft recently admitted that it could not stop certain governments from obtaining its public cloud-hosted data without customers’ permission.”

This is a Paper Tiger argument. There is really no one who knows anything about the cloud who proposes that value begins when you sign in to AWS or Google Cloud. Or that there is no migration of data necessary or that legacy integration is a non-issue. First, a database can be migrated to AWS quite quickly using the RDS migration tools.

The second paragraph states that Microsoft admitted that it could not stop certain governments from obtaining its public cloud-hosted data without customers’ permission. Is that sentence really written correctly? Because it sounds like that is a good thing. Data on AWS can be encrypted. This is covered in the following quotation.

“Amazon S3 default encryption provides a way to set the default encryption behavior for an S3 bucket. You can set default encryption on a bucket so that all objects are encrypted when they are stored in the bucket. The objects are encrypted using server-side encryption with either Amazon S3-managed keys (SSE-S3) or AWS KMS-managed keys (SSE-KMS).”

The Rise of the Hybrid Cloud?

“More and more organizations are realizing that virtualization and private cloud computing are not quite the same.”

Well, they aren’t the same thing….but who said they are the same thing? Virtualization or containers are two technologies that enable the public cloud. Still, VMware is extremely popular in on-premises IT departments, so if these organizations just recently realized that their virtualized on-premises environments are not public cloud, that is a concern. To be more specific, it is not true.

Do Vendors Have the Advantage in Being Cloud Service Providers

“In the short term, these organizations are paving the way for true private cloud capability. Since business process, applications, and cloud services need to go hand in hand in order for businesses to realize quantifiable benefits, the cloud service providers who were originally the application vendors will have a distinct advantage. These vendors are in an advantageous position to modernize the in-house applications of the business and make it “cloud ready.” By doing so, businesses can retain the existing integration points and business processes with the legacy applications.”

This is the opposite of what is true and of what is being observed. AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure are far beyond anything whatever Oracle has in the cloud, and these IaaS providers (even Azure, it turns out) are open to running any solution. SAP and Oracle run clouds that are designed to run SAP and Oracle products. Therefore, in addition to having a far lower capability level, SAP and Oracle greatly restrict customers. Both AWS and Google Cloud do perform development and are leaders in software. However, they are not vendors as they use software to sell other things, which is access to software and compute and storage resources. This distinction between being a software vendor instead of selling access to computational “things” has important implications for the approach that it allows customers to take in managing their IT expenditures.

The second part of the quote regarding “retaining the existing integration points and business processes with the legacy applications” means nothing. This is a filler sentence. Before the author even gets to that point, the argument needs to be that Oracle has a competent cloud, and Oracle does not have this. Indeed, none of this can be true of the cloud IaaS offering itself is entirely uncompetitive.

Hybrid Cloud Will Have the Highest Adoption Rates?

“In the medium term, the hybrid cloud will have the highest adoption rate and compound annual growth rate. Initially, this hybrid cloud will be weighted more toward the in-house cloud, focusing on modernizing the applications, retaining the business functionality, and the integration to legacy applications while building an elastic, scalable model. In the long run, the hybrid cloud will continue to weigh more on the public cloud as the economies of scale and scope of the public cloud are gradually realized. At that point, the public cloud will be functionally rich enough to provide the same capabilities as an internal private cloud at a substantially lower cost. During the later phase of this trend, organizations will focus on improving business processes and making them more feature-rich.”

AWS has 50% year-over-year growth. Oracle’s IaaS is so small; Oracle hides the numbers. And that is including Oracle’s shelfware sales.

Does this sound like a hybrid cloud is winning? Hybrid cloud adds complexity to moving the cloud and is primarily promoted by vendors lagging behind cloud offerings. Companies like vendors.

Conclusion

This is a humiliating article by Oracle on the cloud. The author has no idea what they are talking about, clearly plan to trick the reader with made-up terms, and it made it through SAP marketing without being fact-checked by anyone who did have the appropriate knowledge level. The article has the opposite purpose of informing; it is to misinform to trick Oracle customers into using Oracle Cloud.

We rate this article a 1 out of 10 for accuracy.