Oracle CloudWorld Day 2’s Big Message: Public Cloud Interoperability
Find out what Clay Magouryk and other execs had to say, and where channel partners come in.
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Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, took the keynote stage on Wednesday. Much of the speech involved conversations with customers, and observations about the cloud industry itself.
See the next slide to dive into the details.
Oracle is thinking ahead and working to remove interoperability issues among the disparate cloud brands.
“It’s not just about how you get access to one cloud,” Magouyrk said. “We have to make sure that we actually embrace [multiple clouds] and make it really easy to do.”
In addition, OCI is “not content just to enable new workloads,” he said. Rather, instead of delivering, say, 1,000 services “that solve point problems,” Oracle seeks to deliver as few services as possible “to solve big problems,” Magouyrk said.
Speaking of solving big problems, Oracle Cloud now hosts more than 40 regions.
“We have many more coming,” Magouyrk said.
Those regions aren’t just about location, either.
Oracle categorizes its cloud data centers by type — public cloud, commercial, national security and sovereign. Sovereignty, of course, has become most critical in the European Union, where regulators require data to stay within country boundaries and only be accessible by staff who are citizens. (Hence one of the main reasons for developing Oracle Alloy.)
In terms of what Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers, Magouyrk said, “We’ve been very busy.” To that point, OCI now boasts:
• 105 services
• 260 features launched in last year
• 103% year-over-year consumption growth
“As you can see, the results really speak for themselves,” Magouyrk said.
OCI sees customers use the platform for all manner of use cases, too. As just two examples, a university studies earthquake behavior with the help of OCI. And a professional soccer team relies on it to improve performance.
Another company, a 10-month-old startup called Adept, uses OCI for advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning purposes.
Kelsey Szot, co-founder and product lead, explained that her company works with neural networks called transformers, which Adept trains via the internet.
“We’re training a model how to use every piece of software on your computer so you can interact with your computer just by using human language,” Szot said. “We’ve just been incredibly impressed with OCI … [as we] work on the next era of machine learning.”
When it comes to what this means for organizations, the exact implications remain a bit unclear. However, Szot put it this way: “I think we’re just scratching the surface on the impact this can have on the enterprise. … We’re changing how we collaborate with our computers. … I think it’s going to change the way we interact with computers in every part of our lives.”
Magouyrk agreed.
“We’re investing very heavily in machine learning and AI,” he said.
Cloud computing and smartphones have been around roughly the same number of years (the old data center days notwithstanding). That’s per Magouyrk, who then pointed out a significant difference in adoption of both technologies. Cloud, he said, ranks at about a 32% adoption rate. Smartphones, on the other hand, have about 91% adoption.
“The fact that technology exists does not mean the technology has been adopted,” he said. “The reason for that is, it can be complicated.”
Indeed, privacy laws, regulatory requirements, technical barriers and economic restrictions all play into those adoption rates. Getting more organizations to embrace cloud means vendors making some changes.
“We think we have to … make it really easy to enable our cloud and other clouds to work together,” Magouyrk said.
Oracle Cloud is pursuing that goal through several initiatives.
OCI is working to make cloud computing simpler — and promote higher adoption — through its Distributed Cloud strategy.
This isn’t a new concept from OCI but Oracle does continue to add to Distributed Cloud ’s capabilities. Think cost controls, managed services and local availability (via Dedicated Regions) for performance, security and regulatory compliance.
With Distributed Cloud, OCI intends to move the public cloud computing uptake needle much higher than that current 32% mark, Magouyrk said.
So how do OCI’s Dedicated Regions help companies undergo their own evolutions? Magouyrk called on Scott Petty, CTO of Vodafone, to speak to that point.
“Success for us is going to be around digital transformation,” Petty said. “Digital channels for us are now our biggest channels.”
Vodafone leans on OCI’s Dedicated Regions to reduce its life cycle costs and improve application performance. What that means when it comes to digital transformation is that as Vodafone’s business units have the budget to modernize their apps, the telecom provider does that modernization work via OCI.
And because Vodafone is a European provider, it has to adhere to sovereignty requirements — an OCI strength.
“It’s all about bringing the cloud to you,” said Magouyrk.
If you haven’t heard about Oracle Alloy yet, catch up on the details here. Of course, the introduction of this new platform is the topic of much discussion at this week’s Oracle CloudWorld. And Magouyrk spoke more about it during his keynote.
Because cloud roles are changing, and with those changes come a new set of requirements, Oracle has launched Alloy. The platform mirrors OCI, and lets users bring their own compute, storage, networking devices and accelerated computing. The key is, those users oversee management in their geographies, which complies with sovereignty requirements. So, large system integrators, managed service providers, independent software vendors and other organizations become their own cloud providers.
And that, Magouyrk said, will lead to other benefits.
“Increased competition among cloud providers creates better products and lower prices,” he said.
One motivating reason for Oracle to deliver Alloy?
“We’re not content to only offer our services to other clouds,” Magouyrk said.
To that end, OCI allows workload migration among clouds, especially as customers ask for better interoperability among those clouds.
“What you should expect to see from us is continued innovation in this space,” Magouyrk said.
This includes more connected services among cloud providers and deeper integrations, eventually “blurring lines” among clouds, Magouyrk said.
“My personal goal is, how to do we bring the benefits of the cloud to all workloads to all customers?” he said.
Achieving that interoperability among clouds won’t come easily. But it’s something OCI leaders see as vital to pushing the cloud computing industry forward. Some of the technology that will bring that about is not yet in production, “but we’re moving forward very rapidly,” Magouyrk said.
“We didn’t call up Adam Selipsky and agree on it. The cool thing is, we don’t have to agree,” Magouyrk said. “I’m not waiting. We’re just going to do it.”
In fact, the industry as a whole needs to develop clouds that accommodate interoperability and localized control, he added.
“If you don’t have a good solution for that, people are going to have to go back to on-prem.”
And that’s not where the world is going. So, the solution is interoperability.
“It’s a no-brainer,” Magouyrk said.
How did Oracle reach its conclusions that a platform such as Alloy would be the best way to go?
For one thing, European Union regulations keep getting more stringent. Oracle Cloud executives decided, then, that, rather than trying to “incrementally chase the individual regulations, why don’t we just jump to the end state?” Magouyrk said. “We’re commited to solving that problem because we don’t think it’s going away.”
The three main customer types he envisions for Oracle Alloy are:
• Telecom and technology companies that aren’t large enough to invest in their own cloud infrastructure.
• System integrators
• “Really large” ISVs
“I think it’s going to take time for this concept to propagate for the industry because people have been told something else for so long now,” Magouyrk said. “Customers need diversity and choice. They need to be able to integrate things together.”
Over on the applications side of the house, Oracle is boosting its work with ISVs and SIs — and helping them to work together. These partners are creating intellectual property that flows into Oracle’s application ecosystem, and everyone benefits.
“The idea is to build out not only our integrator ecosystem, but also the ISV ecosystem and their solutions that seamlessly integrate,” Dan Haller (pictured above), group vice president of North America cloud and technology applications alliances and channels, told Channel Futures.
In essence, Oracle SIs and ISVs are working together (think “coopetition” and “ecosystem”) while, at the same time, Oracle is building its applications marketplace.
“‘Ecosystem’ is a buzz word that we hadn’t really tapped into but now we see the potential … and our ISV partners and SI partners are asking for it,” Haller said. “The IP they create is differentiating them.”
The overarching goal is to “drive more value” for customers, Haller said, even as ISVs make more money by selling their apps and SIs capitalize on bringing everything together.
“We’re being very open and transparent on where Oracle needs SIs and ISVs to complement our offerings for particular industries,” Haller said.
One of those industries is private equity. Haller called it a $3 trillion market where firms need to modernize their systems — and do so at a breakneck pace. One customer agreement calls for “120 days from contract signing to go-live,” Haller said by way of example.
“We’re driving the time to deploy back-office solutions down from years to months … with the help of our partners.”
Meanwhile, over on the managed service provider and SI side of the house, Dale Weideling sees a lot of cloud opportunity.
“All of them are trying to figure out the best way to optimize the migration, to make that as low cost as possible,” said Weideling, group vice president of North America cloud and technology alliances and channels, told Channel Futures.
As more of these channel partners understand the value of and need for monthly recurring revenue, they’re seeking out tools that bring workloads into the cloud “as fast and efficiently as possible.”
Weideling’s vision, then, is to get the word out to more MSPs and SIs that “we’re not a niche platform for Oracle workloads, we’re actually an overall platform for all workloads.”
A couple of years ago, Weideling and his team had a hard time getting MSPs and SIs to talk with them. Those partners were deep into Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services deployments “but not too interested in Oracle.”
However, as those workloads — per Weideling — have not performed “as well as they needed,” more channel partners have become willing to talk with Oracle Cloud.
“If you look at OCI and the journey we’ve been on, we’ve been proving ourselves in our niche and starting to break out,” he said.
And it’s just been in the last 12 months or so that Oracle Cloud is “emboldened enough” to talk with partners who “would have slammed the door in our face before.”
These days, “they are eagerly having conversations with us.”
As for Alloy adoption among these partners, it’s still a bit too soon to gauge.
The big takeaway for Weideling is that the channel is indispensable to Oracle’s cloud goals.
“We truly do need partners to get our customers where they want to go,” Weideling said. “I’m 28 years here at Oracle and I don’t think I’ve ever seen the investments we’ve been doing the last couple years. … It’s a really fun time for our partners and the market opportunity it creates for them.”
A couple of years ago, Weideling and his team had a hard time getting MSPs and SIs to talk with them. Those partners were deep into Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services deployments “but not too interested in Oracle.”
However, as those workloads — per Weideling — have not performed “as well as they needed,” more channel partners have become willing to talk with Oracle Cloud.
“If you look at OCI and the journey we’ve been on, we’ve been proving ourselves in our niche and starting to break out,” he said.
And it’s just been in the last 12 months or so that Oracle Cloud is “emboldened enough” to talk with partners who “would have slammed the door in our face before.”
These days, “they are eagerly having conversations with us.”
As for Alloy adoption among these partners, it’s still a bit too soon to gauge.
The big takeaway for Weideling is that the channel is indispensable to Oracle’s cloud goals.
“We truly do need partners to get our customers where they want to go,” Weideling said. “I’m 28 years here at Oracle and I don’t think I’ve ever seen the investments we’ve been doing the last couple years. … It’s a really fun time for our partners and the market opportunity it creates for them.”
ORACLE CLOUDWORLD — Day two of Oracle CloudWorld saw plenty of activity building on day one. Wednesday, though, was more focused on the cloud side of the house, with Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, helming much of the day’s discussion.
Magouryk led the Oracle CloudWorld morning keynote, which picked up on what Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison talked about on Tuesday — interoperability among public clouds.
Indeed, this goal appears to define Oracle’s cloud strategy for the coming years. And the company has already started making good on that strategy … without its competitors’ blessings.
“We didn’t call up Adam Selipsky and agree on it,” Magouryk said, half-jokingly, of Amazon Web Services, during a subsequent Q&A session with media and analysts.
For more on Oracle’s cloud goals, and other outtakes from Oct. 19’s Oracle Cloud World in Las Vegas, see the slideshow above.
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