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Tag: Oracle

  • Oracle Releases Java 20

    Oracle Releases Java 20

    Oracle has released Java 20, the latest Feature Release on the company’s six-month update cycle.

    Java 20 is not a a long-term support (LTS) release, so it will only provide updates until version 21 comes out in six months. Nonetheless, this version provides a number of bug fixes and improvements.

    “Instead of making tens of thousands of fixes and delivering close to one hundred JEPs (JDK Enhancement Proposals) every few years, as we did with yesteryear Major Releases, enhancements are delivered in leaner Feature Releases on a more manageable, predictable, six-month schedule,” writes Sharat Chander Director, Java SE Product Management. “The changes range from significant new features to small enhancements to routine maintenance, bug fixes, and documentation improvements. Each change is represented in a single commit for a single issue in the JDK Bug System.

    “Of the 21,604 JIRA issues marked as fixed in Java 11 through Java 20 at the time of their GA, 15,420 were completed by people working for Oracle while 6,184 were contributed by individual developers and developers working for other organizations.”

    Java 20 also includes a number of significant new features and improvements, including:

    • (D)TLS Key Exchange Named Groups
    • Add GarbageCollectorMXBean for Remark and Cleanup Pause Time in G1
    • Unicode 15.0 Support
    • Improved Control of G1 Concurrent Refinement Threads
    • New JFR Event: jdk.InitialSecurityProperty
    • New JFR Event: jdk.SecurityProviderService
    • …and much more

    For more information, check out Oracle’s full release announcement.

  • Get Ready for Another Nvidia GPU Crunch

    Get Ready for Another Nvidia GPU Crunch

    Gamers may enjoy a ready supply of Nvidia GPUs, but that may soon change as the AI market heats up.

    During the pandemic and crypto heyday, Nvidia’s GPUs were in short supply. The sudden uptick in demand for personal computers and crypto mining rigs combined to drive the price of Nvidia’s GPUs through the roof and make it almost impossible to actually buy one.

    Those days may return faster than anyone — except Nvidia, of course — may like. At the GTC 2023 Keynote yesterday, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang made it clear that Nvidia is all-in on AI.

    “We are at the iPhone moment of AI,” Huang said during his keynote, in which he touted the number of companies rolling out Nvidia’s AI systems. The list of companies includes Atos, AWS, Cirrascale, CoreWeave, Dell, Gigabyte, HPE, Lambda, Lenovo, Oracle, QCT, and Supermicro.

    As TechRadar’s John Loeffler points out, the increased demand for Nvidia’s chips in the AI market could eventually force the company to choose between the consumer gaming market and the more profitable commercial market. This could lead to a significant reduction in available GPUs, or it could lead to Nvidia pulling out of the market altogether.

  • Red Hat Signs Partnership to Bring RHEL to Oracle Cloud

    Red Hat Signs Partnership to Bring RHEL to Oracle Cloud

    Red Hat has signed a major partnership with Oracle to bring Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

    Red Hat is a leading Linux and open source company, with its RHEL being one of the most popular enterprise Linux offerings and the backbone of the company’s hybrid cloud tech. The expanded partnership with Oracle will see RHEL running as a supported operating system on OCI.

    “Starting today, customers can deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux on OCI and receive full support for these certified configurations from both Red Hat and Oracle,” said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Deepening our collaboration in the future will see us support additional products and workloads on OCI so customers have more flexibility.”

    The two companies clearly see a chance to capitalize on their combined popularity.

    Ninety percent of the Fortune 500 currently rely on Red Hat and Oracle solutions. For many of these companies, Red Hat Enterprise Linux serves as their operating system foundation and OCI offers them high-performing, mission-critical cloud services, to power digital-forward operations. Now these organizations are able to standardize their cloud operations with Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on OCI, which enables customers to gain a common platform that stretches from their datacenter to the OCI distributed cloud.

    “Customer choice, from hardware to cloud provider, is a crucial commitment for Red Hat, whether these organizations are running operations in their own datacenters, on multiple public clouds or at the far edge,” said Ashesh Badani, senior vice president, head of Products, Red Hat. “Our collaboration with Oracle to deliver full support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on OCI further cements this commitment to choice by extending cloud deployment options for our customers, and laying the foundation to make additional Red Hat solutions available to customers digitally transforming on OCI.”

    The deal is a big win for Red Hat and its parent company IBM, as well as for Linux in general.

  • SymphonyAI Taps Oracle for Cloud Services

    SymphonyAI Taps Oracle for Cloud Services

    Oracle has scored another win, partnering with SymphonyAI to provide it with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) services.

    SymphonyAI is a leading artificial intelligence firm, creating applications that leverage AI to help businesses gain insights and educate their decision-making process. According to Zacks Equity Research, the company plans to use OCI services to further help it deliver real-time insights, combined with the cost-efficiencies of cloud computing.

    The partnership is the latest in a long line of Oracle successes that have seen the company gain significant ground in the cloud market. While not in the top three, Oracle has increasingly been turning heads and gaining recognition for the value proposition it offers.

    In fact, the company appears poised to be a big winner in the cloud industry in 2023, and this latest partnership is one more step toward that goal.

  • Oracle Poised to Be Big Cloud Winner in 2023

    Oracle Poised to Be Big Cloud Winner in 2023

    Oracle is poised to be a big winner in the cloud industry in 2023, thanks to a combination of factors, including its “modest valuation.”

    Oracle is not one of the cloud market’s Big Three — AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — but has nonetheless made significant headway in the market, including scoring major contracts and poaching customers from its larger rivals.

    According to Seeking Alpha, Monness, Crespi, Hardt analyst Brian White said the company was “well positioned” going into 2023. In particular, the company was a “steady hand in a treacherous market,” seeing less of a stock decline than many in the tech industry.

    “In our view, no company is immune to an economic downturn; however, we believe the tailwind of the Oracle Cloud and the stock’s modest valuation provide some downside protection,” White wrote to clients.

    Oracle’s stature was also boosted by its inclusion in the $9 billion multi-vendor Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC), the successor to the abandoned Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contact.

    White called it a “prestigious win” and says it shows just how much progress Oracle has made in the cloud market.

  • Pentagon Awards Cloud Contracts to Multiple Vendors for JEDI Successor (Updated)

    Pentagon Awards Cloud Contracts to Multiple Vendors for JEDI Successor (Updated)

    The Pentagon has awarded contracts to multiple cloud vendors as it seeks to replace the defunct JEDI contract.

    The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contact was the Pentagon’s attempt to modernize its IT operations and migrate to the cloud. AWS was largely seen as the frontrunner until Microsoft was awarded the entire $10 billion contract. AWS responded by suing the Pentagon relentlessly until the DoD canceled the contract in favor of the $9 billion multi-vendor Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC).

    “The purpose of this contract is to provide the Department of Defense with enterprise-wide, globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic level to the tactical edge,” the DoD writes in the award notices. “The Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability will allow mission owners to acquire authorized commercial cloud offerings directly from the Cloud Service Providers contract awardees. Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability is a multiple award contract.”

    The multi-vendor contract was awarded to AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and Oracle. Rather than define the share of the contract each company will receive, each company is part of the same $9 billion pool and will receive funds as their services are needed.

    “No funds will be obligated at the time of award; funds will be obligated on individual orders as they are issued,” the DoD continues.

    Only time will tell if all four cloud players, especially AWS, accept the terms or resort to lawsuits in an effort to secure more favorable terms.

    Update: Amazon has reached out to WPN with the following statement:

    “We are honored to have been selected for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract and look forward to continuing our support for the Department of Defense. From the enterprise to the tactical edge, we are ready to deliver industry-leading cloud services to enable the DoD to achieve its critical mission.”

  • Oracle Has a ‘Cloud-First’ Problem As Rivals Threaten Its Database Dominance

    Oracle Has a ‘Cloud-First’ Problem As Rivals Threaten Its Database Dominance

    Oracle may be the undisputed king of the database market, but cloud-first rivals are threatening that dominance with cheaper, more flexible options.

    Oracle has long been the dominant player in the database market. Even as the cloud has grown in importance, Oracle has managed to carve out a meaningful share of the market, thanks in large part to the strength of its database platform. Many customers see it as a full turn-key solution, combining the cloud and database solutions necessary. In spite of that, according to a report by Bloomberg, Oracle’s database dominance may be under threat from cloud-first rivals.

    Bloomberg cites the example of Shutterfly, which recently made the decision to move its database to the cloud. Despite relying on Oracle for years, the company decided to go in a different direction with the transition.

    Read more: Larry Ellison Touts Oracle Cloud’s Reliability in Wake of AWS Outage

    “The amount of time and energy that was consumed purely running just the plumbing was immense,” Chief Technology Officer Moudy Elbayadi said in an interview. A review of the existing options on the market led Shutterfly to conclude that Oracle’s solutions didn’t “fit our desires to have that level of openness and flexibility,” Elbayadi added.

    Unfortunately for Oracle, Shutterfly isn’t an isolated example. JPMorgan, Nasdaq Inc, JetBlue Airways Corp, and Automatic Data Process Inc are among the list of companies transitioning to non-Oracle options.

    “We have actually quite rapidly been reducing our Oracle footprint,” said Nikolai Larbalestier, Nasdaq’s senior vice president of cloud strategy and enterprise architecture. “There are plenty of good alternatives today.”

    Part of the problem stems from the complexity involved in running Oracle’s database and the cost to the client company of doing so. Mythical Games CEO John Linden emphasized the issue, despite his firm being valued at $1.2 billion.

    “Oracle hits us up every week,” he said. But “we’d have to have a massive team in place to run it appropriately.”

    See also: Google, Microsoft, and Oracle Had the Most Vulnerabilities in Early 2021

    Just as significant, Oracle’s tools seem to be developing a reputation for not being up to par with the latest developments, making the prospect of working with them unappealing to many developers.

    “I can’t even hire people if I told them that we majorly use Oracle,” Yao Morin, chief data officer at JLL Technologies, told Bloomberg. “People are yearning for better tools.”

    To be clear, Oracle is still the company to beat in the database market, especially among companies that want on-premise database solutions. Nonetheless, the company clearly has some significant areas it needs to improve on if it wants to remain relevant in the coming years. Otherwise, it may find itself in the same situation as IBM when personal computers replaced mainframes — the undisputed leader of a niche market.

  • Oracle Laying Off More Employees

    Oracle Laying Off More Employees

    Oracle is laying off additional employees just months after a round of layoffs led to “complete chaos.”

    Companies large and small have been slashing spending, freezing hiring, and laying off workers amid the worst economic downturn in years. Oracle is among those companies, engaging in another round of layoffs, according to Business Insider.

    Unlike its previous round of layoffs, this round is unannounced. As a result, there’s no indication how many employees will ultimately be impacted. Some employees are reportedly being told they have until October 31 to secure a new role within the company, while others are being told their employee will be terminated the following Monday.

    Jeremiah Cundiff, Cloud Technology Consultant at Oracle, is one such employee that appears to be in the latter group. Cundiff posted the news on LinkedIn:

    There have been posts regarding #layoffs at #oracle. Unfortunately I got my call this morning that I’ve been included. I aim to remain in tech sales either in business development or as an account executive.

    Insider attributes the layoffs to Oracle’s efforts to trim costs following its $28.3 billion purchase of medical records company Cerner.

  • Oracle Opens New Region for Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure in South Africa

    Oracle Opens New Region for Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure in South Africa

    Oracle is expanding its Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure, opening a new region in Johannesburg, South Africa.

    Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure allows customers to integrate and use the two cloud platforms, making it an ideal option for hybrid cloud deployments. The new region will allow customers throughout Africa to use Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure.

    “Our longstanding collaboration with Microsoft Azure gives our joint customers the flexibility and choice to innovate using the best of both our clouds. With growing customer demand for multicloud capabilities across Africa, we look forward to helping Microsoft Azure customers migrate their workloads to the cloud without the need for complicated re-platforming, while giving them seamless access to Oracle Database services on OCI,” said Nick Redshaw, senior vice president, Technology Cloud, Middle East and Africa, Oracle.

    “Microsoft and Oracle share a long-standing history of delivering excellence on behalf of our mutual customers and supporting their evolving needs,” said Colin Erasmus, COO, Microsoft South Africa. “Expanding the Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure to Johannesburg ensures our valued customers in this region can benefit from the choice to deploy multicloud solutions.”

    Oracle emphasized the benefits of a multicloud approach.

    With Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure, customers in Africa can now migrate and run mission-critical enterprise workloads across their Azure and OCI environments with a private, dedicated low-latency connection and identity federation. Customers also receive a collaborative, comprehensive service support model. Pricing is port-based with no additional charges for bandwidth consumed.

  • Oracle Brings MySQL HeatWave to AWS

    Oracle Brings MySQL HeatWave to AWS

    Oracle has brought its MySQL HeatWave to AWS in an effort to help customers keep costs down and benefit from Oracle’s services.

    MySQL HeatWave is billed as “the only service that combines OLTP, analytics, machine learning, and machine learning-based automation within a single MySQL database.” Oracle found many of its customers came from AWS, or are running a multi-cloud setup and want to keep costs down.

    “Oracle believes in giving customers a choice. Many of our MySQL HeatWave customers migrated from AWS. Others wish to continue running parts of their application on AWS. Those customers face serious challenges including exorbitant data egress fees charged by AWS and higher latency when accessing a database service running in Oracle’s cloud,” said Edward Screven, chief corporate architect, Oracle. “We are addressing these issues while delivering outstanding performance and price performance across transaction, analytics, and machine learning compared to other database cloud providers—even Amazon’s own databases running on AWS, where you’d think they would have an advantage. We wanted to offer AWS customers this choice to benefit from MySQL HeatWave innovation without moving their data from AWS, or developers needing to learn a new platform.”

    Oracle is positioning MySQL HeatWave as a multi-cloud option, with support for OCI and AWS, as well as plans to support Microsoft Azure in the near future. Oracle also provides the service for on-premise customers via Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer.

    “While AWS offers a smorgasbord of cloud database services specialized for each data type and capability, MySQL HeatWave on AWS follows Oracle’s converged database strategy—offering transaction, analytics, ML, and Autopilot automation all in one. For AWS users, this means no charges for add-on services, extra storage, data egress fees, connectors, and more. For cost conscious IT teams and developers, MySQL HeatWave on AWS represents a whole new TCO calculation with zero cost for what are add-on services on AWS and no data egress fees,” said Marc Staimer, senior analyst, Wikibon. “And just as Usain Bolt left all of his competitors in the dust and set new world records that have yet to be broken, the latest price performance benchmark results demonstrate that MySQL HeatWave on AWS is 7X better than Amazon Redshift. If you follow the money, the choice is easy.”

  • Steve Jobs Was Right, and Tech Firms Are Screwing Up With Mass Layoffs

    Steve Jobs Was Right, and Tech Firms Are Screwing Up With Mass Layoffs

    Tech firms are setting themselves up for problems by not following the Steve Jobs playbook for responding to an economic downturn.

    Companies across the tech industry have started freezing hiring or laying off employees, including Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Shopify, Tesla, and others. According to Business Insider’s Sawdah Bhaimiya, that strategy is a mistake that will come back to haunt those companies.

    Bhaimiya makes the case that each layoff tarnishes a company’s reputation and brand and will hurt its ability to attract top talent down the road.

    “Every time I see a notice in the news that such and such technology company has cut X percentage of their workforce, I don’t forget that,” Danny Allen, chief technology officer at software firm Veeam, told Bhaimiya. “So you’re sending a message that also has a brand impact that you don’t necessarily want to be associated with.

    “Employees remember and people looking for jobs remember how organizations acted during the economic downturn.”

    Allen went on to expound on the two specific ways layoffs hurt a company:

    “One is simply the loss of innovation, cutting resources,” said Allen. “You’re cutting your investment in future technology, that’s number one. Number two, when you cut 10% of your workforce, you’re sending the message to your employees that we care more about money than we do about you.

    “And employees have a long memory, so if you’re cutting people that uncertainty is very disconcerting.”

    How Steve Jobs and Apple Thought Different

    Interestingly, Steve Jobs had a very different approach to dealing with an economic downturn, arguably one far worse than the current downturn.

    “We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst,” Jobs said. “What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that’s exactly what we did. And it worked. And that’s exactly what we’ll do this time.”

    Jobs’ approach is the very opposite of what current companies are doing and directly addresses the two issues Allen raises:

    • Rather than risking innovation by losing some of its best people, Apple doubled down, intent on innovating through the downturn rather than simply trying to weather it and pick up innovation afterward.
    • Jobs reiterated the value he and the company placed on the people who worked there. As Jobs said, Apple had put forth a tremendous amount of effort getting the people it had. Why lose them over a temporary downturn?

    It’s safe to say Jobs’ approach is a significant factor in Apple being where it is today. The company’s innovation continued unabated, and its employees felt respected and valued, confident the company had their backs.

    Today’s tech companies should take note…or pay the price later.

  • Oracle Faces Class Action Suit Over Its ‘Mass Surveillance’

    Oracle Faces Class Action Suit Over Its ‘Mass Surveillance’

    Oracle is facing a class action lawsuit over what is being described as its “mass surveillance” of the general public.

    Oracle is the world’s leading database provider and a popular cloud provider. The company is accused (PDF) of using its position and platforms to collect real-time data on hundreds of millions of users and selling it. The lawsuit alleges the data is being collected on the general public, including individuals who have no direct relationship with Oracle nor any ability to consent or object to the data collection.

    This complaint sets forth how the regularly conducted business practices of defendant Oracle America, Inc. (“Oracle”) amount to a deliberate and purposeful surveillance of the general population via their digital and online existence. In the course of functioning as a worldwide data broker, Oracle has created a network that tracks in real-time and records indefinitely the personal information of hundreds of millions of people. Oracle sells this detailed personal information to third parties, either directly, or through its “ID Graph” and other related products and services derived from this data. The proposed Classes herein lack a direct relationship with Oracle and have no reasonable or practical basis upon which they could legally consent to Oracle’s surveillance.

    The plaintiffs consist of Dr. Johnny Ryan, a Senior Fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, and a Senior Fellow at the Open Markets Institute; Dr. Jennifer Golbeck, an associate professor at the University of Maryland in College Park and Director of the Social Intelligence Lab; and Michael Katz-Lacabe, a privacy rights activist.

    The plaintiffs make the case that company founder Larry Ellison set out to establish Oracle as a surveillance powerhouse.

    According to Ellison, the purpose of Oracle ID Graph is to predict and influence the future behavior of billions of people. He explained Oracle could achieve this goal by looking at social activity and locations in real time, including “micro location[s].” For example, Ellison has represented that companies will be able to know how much time someone spends in a specific aisle of a specific store and what is in the aisle of the store. “By collecting this data and marrying it to things like micro location information, Internet users’ search histories, websites visits and product comparisons along with their demographic data, and past purchase data, Oracle will be able to predict purchase intent better than anyone.”

    It’s unclear how successful the lawsuit will be. The US notoriously has no comprehensive privacy legislation, making any such lawsuit an uphill battle. At the same time, the lawsuit was filed in California, one of the few states in the US that does have privacy legislation.

    If the plaintiffs are successful, it could have profound repercussions for the US data broker industry, an industry that is already under scrutiny from privacy-minded lawmakers.

  • Oracle Begins Audit of TikTok’s Algorithms for Beijing’s Influence

    Oracle Begins Audit of TikTok’s Algorithms for Beijing’s Influence

    TikTok is pulling out all the stops to prove it is independent of Beijing’s influence, turning to Oracle to audit its algorithms.

    TikTok has been under scrutiny for years over its data and privacy practices, with the Trump administration trying to ban the app. Experts are concerned about the wealth of data the app has access to, and how much of that data is available to Chinese authorities.

    The company’s executives even swore before Congress that Americans’ data was handled by an American team, only for it to be revealed that the data actually was handled by their colleagues in China.

    Read more: Is TikTok Replacing Google?

    Following new cries to ban the app, TikTok is going to great lengths to prove it can be trusted. According to Axios, that includes having Oracle audit the platform’s algorithms to prove how its data is being handled. The company has begun routing its US user data through Oracle’s servers as part of Project Texas, a reference to Oracle’s Texas-based headquarters.

    A spokesperson told Axios that the review process began last week and that Oracle will engage in “regular vetting and validation” of TikTok’s moderation and recommendation models. The reviews will also reveal how the platform’s algorithms recommend content “to ensure that outcomes are in line with expectations and that the models have not been manipulated in any way.”

    It’s an unusual step for a company or platform to open up its most secret code to another company for review. It likely helps that Oracle was in talks to buy TikTok when it was under threat of ban.

    Only time will tell if these measures are enough to reassure US lawmakers and if the company can finally deliver on the privacy promises it has made.

  • Oracle Layoffs Lead to ‘Complete Chaos’

    Oracle Layoffs Lead to ‘Complete Chaos’

    Oracle’s layoffs have hit its marketing and customer experience (CX) divisions, causing chaos within the company.

    News broke in early August that Oracle planned to lay off thousands of employees in the US, Canada, Europe, and India. According to Business Insider, the layoffs have begun, hitting the marketing and CX departments especially hard. Insider’s sources say it’s “complete chaos” within the company, with those left wondering if they’ll be next.

    “The people who have left are breathing a sigh of relief,” said a marketing employee who was laid off. “And the people who are still here are definitely running for the hills.”

    Marketing teams have reportedly been cut by 30 to 50%.

    “There’s no marketing anymore,” a senior marketing leader who was laid off on Monday told Insider. “We’re not even supposed to say we’re in marketing because there is no marketing division.”

    While Insider could not get exact numbers, one person told the outlet that Advertising and Customer Experience (ACX) had suffered up to an 80% reduction.

    “The common verb to describe ACX is that they were obliterated,” said a person inside Oracle.

    Oracle has been working to expand its cloud business, taking on its larger rivals and scoring significant victories along the way. It’s unclear how the layoffs will impact its long-term plans, but they will certainly not help morale at the company and could impact its ability to attract new talent.

  • Oracle Begins Laying People Off

    Oracle Begins Laying People Off

    Layoffs have begun at Oracle, with the company planning to cut thousands of jobs to reduce expenses.

    According to The Information, via Reuters, Oracle is planning to cut up to $1 billion in expenses and is turning to job cuts to help. At the time of writing the job cuts are primarily impacting the company’s San Francisco offices, although there was no specific number given.

    The Information also reports that layoffs are expected in Canada, India, and Europe in the coming weeks and months although, again, no specific numbers were given.

    The entire industry is looking to cut costs in preparation for an impending recession. Oracle, however, is among the first to start mass layoffs.

  • Microsoft Organizing Cloud Vendors to Take On Amazon’s Government Dominance

    Microsoft Organizing Cloud Vendors to Take On Amazon’s Government Dominance

    Microsoft is working to put a dent in Amazon’s dominance in the government agency cloud computing space, organizing its rivals to help.

    Amazon’s AWS is the leading cloud provider platform, both in the private sector as well as the public. Microsoft is its largest rival, and the company is working on getting other companies to help lobby against Amazon’s dominance, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

    Microsoft has been sharing talking points with cloud providers Google and Oracle, as well as IBM, VMware, Dell, and HP Enterprise. The talking points are aimed at lobbying Washington to require a multi-vendor approach for large cloud contracts. According to WSJ’s sources, Microsoft has not included Amazon in its efforts.

    Read more: Microsoft Azure Is a Major Threat to AWS

    There’s certainly no love lost between Amazon and Microsoft, especially in their battle for the cloud market. Microsoft famously scored the Pentagon’s JEDI contract, worth some $10 billion, only to have Amazon relentlessly challenge the win in court until the Department of Defense was forced to abandon the contract in an effort to move forward with its cloud transition.

    Not long after, AWS won a $10 billion contract to provide cloud services to the National Security Agency. Microsoft challenged that contract award but was unsuccessful in overturning the results.

    More recently, an AWS exec took Microsoft to task over its cloud licensing terms, accusing the company of not putting customers’ needs first and engaging in anti-competitive behavior.

    It appears the rivalry between Microsoft and AWS is picking up steam with no end in sight. If Microsoft is successful in rallying the smaller cloud providers to its cause, it could represent the single biggest threat that AWS has ever faced.

  • Microsoft and Oracle Partner to Integrate Azure and Oracle Cloud

    Microsoft and Oracle Partner to Integrate Azure and Oracle Cloud

    Microsoft and Oracle are partnering to integrate their cloud platforms, providing customers with a powerful multicloud option.

    Oracle and Microsoft have announced Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure, a way for Azure customers to easily access Oracle Database services in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The new service builds on a partnership dating back to 2019.

    “Microsoft and Oracle have a long history of working together to support the needs of our joint customers, and this partnership is an example of how we offer customer choice and flexibility as they digitally transform with cloud technology. Oracle’s decision to select Microsoft as its preferred partner deepens the relationship between our two companies and provides customers with the assurance of working with two industry leaders,” said Corey Sanders, corporate vice president, Microsoft Cloud for Industry and Global Expansion.

    The service will allow customers to connect their Azure subscription to OCI. The service will automatically configure everything necessary to integrate the two platforms, providing a familiar Oracle Database Services dashboard combined with Azure terminology and the benefit of Azure Application Insights monitoring.

    “There’s a well-known myth that you can’t run real applications across two clouds. We can now dispel that myth as we give Oracle and Microsoft customers the ability to easily test and demonstrate the value of combining Oracle databases with Azure applications. There is no need for deep skills on either of our platforms or complex configurations—anyone can use the Azure Portal to harness the power of our two clouds together,” said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

    The partnership between Microsoft and Oracle should help both companies leverage their respective benefits in their quest to gain more of the cloud market.

  • UK Heatwave Takes Out Google and Oracle Cloud Servers

    UK Heatwave Takes Out Google and Oracle Cloud Servers

    The UK is experiencing record heat, and it’s taking a toll on cloud servers and the websites they power.

    According to The Register, the UK is experiencing a heat wave that has topped 104.5F. The country doesn’t usually see that kind of heat and is ill-equipped to deal with it. Google and Oracle’s data centers are taking a hit, with some machines being powered down to avoid permanent damage.

    “There has been a cooling related failure in one of our buildings that hosts zone europe-west2-a for region europe-west2,” Google wrote in an advisory. “This caused a partial failure of capacity in that zone, leading to VM terminations and a loss of machines for a small set of our customers. We’re working hard to get the cooling back on-line and create capacity in that zone. We do not anticipate further impact in zone europe-west2-a and currently running VMs should not be impacted. A small percentage of replicated Persistent Disk devices are running in single redundant mode.

    “In order to prevent damage to machines and an extended outage, we have powered down part of the zone and are limiting GCE preemptible launches. We are working to restore redundancy for any remaining impacted replicated Persistent Disk devices.”

    Similarly, Oracle issued a statement of its own, blaming “unseasonal temperatures.”

    “As a result of unseasonal temperatures in the region, a subset of cooling infrastructure within the UK South (London) Data Centre has experienced an issue,” the company wrote. “The relevant service teams have been engaged and are working to restore the affected infrastructure back to a healthy state. Our engineers expect redundancy to the impacted cooling infrastructure to be restored within the next 1-2 hours, after which services will begin to be recovered.”

    Oracle later updated its statement to reflect an improvement in the situation.

    “We’re continuing repair work on cooling systems in the UK South (London) datacenter to further reduce operating temperatures and mitigate service impact. Datacenter temperatures have reached workable levels and service team engineers are now able to begin working to restore the impacted services. Impacted services are monitoring the recovery process as affected service infrastructure is restored to an operational state.”

    Given the effects of climate change, cloud providers will need to start planning for “unseasonal temperatures” and freak weather events if they plan to remain operational.

  • Oracle the First Major Cloud Provider to Open Cloud Region in Mexico

    Oracle the First Major Cloud Provider to Open Cloud Region in Mexico

    Oracle has beat its larger rivals to a significant milestone, becoming the first major cloud provider to open a cloud region in Mexico.

    Cloud providers open data centers in various regions in an effort to improve the speeds and availability of their services to customers in those areas. Despite being in eighth place in the cloud market and well behind AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, Oracle has managed to open a Mexico data region first in the state of Querétaro.

    “We are excited to establish a cloud region in Mexico that will offer public and private organizations, as well as partners and developers, the opportunity to leverage OCI to grow their businesses,” said Maribel Dos Santos, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Mexico. “The Oracle Cloud Querétaro region offers organizations a wide range of services, including access to emerging technologies, to help improve the customer experience and positively impact the country’s ecosystem of innovation.”

    Oracle also took the opportunity to reaffirm its commitment to transitioning to renewable energy. The company plans to power all of its data centers with renewable energy by 2025, including the new Querétaro location.

  • Oracle Turns to AI to Automate Digital Marketing With Fusion Marketing

    Oracle Turns to AI to Automate Digital Marketing With Fusion Marketing

    In an industry first, Oracle is using artificial intelligence (AI) to help automate digital marketing.

    AI is revolutionizing a wide range of industries, but Oracle is applying it to digital marketing campaigns, with its newly announced Fusion Marketing platform. Unlike many lead generation systems, that merely raise brand awareness, Fusion Marketing is specifically designed to generate leads.

    Fusion Marketing uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically score leads at the account level, predict when consumers are ready to talk to a salesperson, and generate a qualified sales opportunity in any CRM system.

    Oracle hopes Fusion Marketing will address the disconnect many salespeople feel when using a CRM system, where siloed data often works against making a sale. Oracle’s new system is designed to address that and accelerate marketing campaigns by automating the lead generation process from end-to-end.

    “It is time for our industry to think differently about marketing and sales automation so that we can transform CRM into a system that actually works for both the marketer and the salesperson,” said Rob Tarkoff, executive vice president and general manager, Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience. “This is not about forecasts and rollups or a reporting tool to see how the sales force is performing, but instead about turning CRM into a system that helps sellers sell. A huge part of that change is bringing marketing and sales teams together and eliminating the low-value, time consuming tasks that distract from building customer relationships and closing deals. That’s why we have invested so much time engineering a system that will help marketers fully automate lead generation and qualification and get highly qualified leads to the sales team faster.”

    Oracle’s Fusion Marketing is just the beginning, as experts say AI will continue to transform digital marketing.

    “Machine learning algorithms are integral to digital marketing and that will only increase over time. The best digital marketers have embraced this fact, and have already shifted their focus towards more human-first activities. Machines are better at crunching numbers and making data-driven decisions. But they still need humans to decide what data to feed into those systems. This comes from understanding human behavior, a deep sense of empathy, and expert-level storytelling that are hard to replicate through AI.” – Dennis Consorte, Digital Marketing Expert and Expert at Digital.com, told WebProNews.

  • Microsoft Azure Is a Major Threat to AWS

    Microsoft Azure Is a Major Threat to AWS

    Multiple reports are showing that Microsoft Azure is increasingly becoming a major threat to AWS in the cloud space.

    AWS is the current market leader among public cloud providers, with Microsoft Azure in second place and Google Cloud in third. Despite AWS’s lead, according to the Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report, Azure usage has surpassed AWS in several instances, representing the first time this has happened in 11 years of Flexera’s reporting:

    As in previous years, AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform are the top three public cloud providers. But for the first time, Azure has closed the gap with AWS, while other cloud providers have not shown much growth. For each public cloud provider, respondents specified whether they’re running significant workloads in that cloud, running some workloads, experimenting, plan to use it or had no plans to use it.

    Interestingly, Azure took the lead in overall breadth of adoption among organizations:

    Azure passed AWS for breadth of adoption among enterprises. Google Cloud Platform has the highest percentage for experimentation (23 percent) and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has the highest percentage of plan to use (twelve percent), which could drive more adoption in future years.

    Azure also scored a win among “enterprises running some or significant workloads on the platforms.” While Azure tied with AWS at 47% of organizations using it for significant workloads, it surpassed AWS among organizations using it for some workloads, at 33% vs 30%.

    Of the top six cloud providers, Azure was the only one that saw its adoption rate increase year-over-year, coming in at 80% in 2022 vs 76% in 2021. In contrast, AWS adoption rates dropped in 2022 to 77%, down from 79% in 2021. Similarly, Google dropped from 49% to 48% and Oracle dropped from 32% to 27%. IBM Cloud’s adoption rate stayed steady at 25%, while Alibaba dropped from 13% to 11%.

    While Flexera’s report is telling enough, it’s supported by a new report from Credit Suisse. According to Investing.com, Credit Suisse analysts outlined how “Azure has grown meaningfully faster than AWS” and, as companies transition to the cloud, “the full multi-year impact of Azure’s growth opportunity is still not properly reflected in consensus estimates.”

    Overall, the two reports are excellent news for Microsoft and dovetail with previous reports demonstrating the growth potential of Azure.