For nearly five decades, Oracle has been the quiet giant of enterprise software, relying on its bread-and-butter database solutions to stay relevant.
While it gradually moved its core offerings to the cloud over the past decade, the shift was more evolutionary than revolutionary.
All that has changed now with the rise of generative AI (GenAI), marking a new era for Oracle and a much more aggressive strategy in cloud infrastructure.
In a bold move, Oracle has forged alliances with its cloud rivals—Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services (AWS)—to embed Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) directly within these hyperscalers’ data centres. Oracle’s Autonomous Database and Exadata infrastructure will now reside in, and seamlessly integrate with, these giants’ technologies and services.
This collaboration paves the way for a more flexible, interoperable cloud ecosystem, allowing organisations to access applications across platforms without hassle. As Oracle’s co-founder Larry Ellison describes it, the industry is ushering in the era of multi-cloud.
“Customers may use many applications, but the problem is that clouds don’t work well together, nor are they gracefully integrated,” he said, at the Oracle CloudWorld event in Las Vegas two weeks ago. “Connecting multiclouds is doable, but the interconnect isn’t optimal—it’s not easy to use or fast to run.”
Oracle’s solution? Embedding OCI directly inside AWS, Google, and Microsoft Azure to deliver superior performance, higher bandwidth, and lower latency.
“Multi-cloud is not a one-way street,” Ellison emphasised. “If you’re a Google Cloud customer, you can use Oracle. In this multi-cloud world, you can mix and match the applications you want from different clouds.”
Industry experts agree that Oracle’s pivot to multi-cloud is a game-changer. Franco Chiam, IDC’s vice president for infrastructure cloud and telecom, noted that Oracle’s multi-cloud strategy allows organisations to access integrated services from multiple providers.
“Oracle’s deep expertise in data management positions them to address critical concerns around security, privacy, and governance, particularly in the context of GenAI,” he told Techgoondu in Singapore.
Oracle’s renewed focus on cloud has been paying off. Its cloud infrastructure business has been booming, driving the company’s quarterly revenue to US$13.31 billion in the period ending August 2024—an 8 per cent increase year-over-year.
Earlier in the year, chief executive Safra Catz had announced plans to spend US$10 billion in 2025 to build out even more data centres.
And Oracle is not just shaking up the cloud infrastructure game. It is pushing the envelope on cybersecurity, too.
In a declaration at Oracle CloudWorld, Ellison set an audacious goal: By 2025, Oracle employees will no longer use passwords to access the company’s systems. Instead, they will rely on AI-powered biometric authentication.
“Traditional passwords are very dangerous,” he said, citing the security risks from password re-use which have led to several data breaches.
This no-password strategy will affect roughly 150,000 Oracle employees worldwide. The company will work with its own zero-trust security architecture.
IDC’s Chiam noted: “Biometric logins will not only boost security but also improve convenience and productivity.”
But he cautioned that biometric systems are costly, and the ecosystem for biometric scanners and other components is not fully developed yet. Governance issues and the potential for false positives also present challenges.
Ellison’s vision for a password-free future is just part of a larger push to strengthen Oracle’s place in the cybersecurity landscape, a space it has been in since its inception – its very first customer was the CIA.
While critics might argue that Oracle is a latecomer to cloud, the company is making up for lost time rapidly. It has committed to building 100 new cloud data centres worldwide while expanding 66 existing ones. As its cloud business gains momentum and the AI revolution continues, Oracle’s future looks bright.
