FedEx is preparing to shut down its data centers and mainframes, opting for cloud-native solutions instead.
Company CIO Rob Carter made the announcement at the FedEx investor day, according to DCD, saying the company will save some $400 million.
“We’ve been working across this decade to streamline and simplify our technology and systems,” he said. “We’ve shifted to cloud…we’ve been eliminating monolithic applications one after the other after the other…we’re moving to a zero data center, zero mainframe environment that’s more flexible, secure, and cost-effective.”
“Within the next two years we’ll close the last few remaining data centers that we have, we’ll eliminate the final 20 percent of the mainframe footprint, and we’ll move the remaining applications to cloud-native structures that allow them to be flexibly deployed and used in the marketplace and business. While we’re doing this, we’ll achieve $400 million of annual savings.”
FedEx currently uses both Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud for its cloud needs. Nothing was said about whether the company will go all-in on a single vendor or whether it will continue its multicloud approach.
Oracle reported its quarterly results, beating guidance as a result of strong cloud results.
Oracle is currently fighting for market share in the cloud market, behind leaders AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Nonetheless, the company has been making solid progress, thanks to its being able to offer the full stack of database and cloud solutions.
In its most recent quarter, the company’s revenue hit $11.2 billion, an increase of 8% year-over-year. Net income came in at $4 billion, or $1.37 per share, an increase of 29%.
Cloud services and license support revenue came in at $7.4 billion, an increase of 8%. Meanwhile, cloud license and on-premise license revenue came in at $2.1 billion, an increase of 9%.
“Our Q4 performance was absolutely outstanding with total revenue beating guidance by nearly $200 million, and non-GAAP earnings per share beating guidance by $0.24,” said Oracle CEO, Safra Catz. “Our multi-billion dollar Fusion and NetSuite cloud applications businesses saw dramatic increases in their already rapid revenue growth rates: Fusion ERP was up 30% in Q3 and up 46% in Q4, Fusion HCM was up 23% in Q3 and up 35% in Q4, NetSuite was up 24% in Q3 and up 26% in Q4. Oracle Fusion is the world’s biggest cloud ERP business; Oracle NetSuite is the world’s second biggest cloud ERP business. Revenue from our Gen2 Cloud Infrastructure business including Autonomous Database grew over 100% in Q4. The accelerating growth rates of both our applications and infrastructure cloud businesses this year drove earnings per share growth up to 21% in FY21. That is the fourth consecutive year of double-digit earnings per share growth at Oracle Corporation.”
“The world’s two most popular databases are the Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle MySQL,” said Oracle Chairman and CTO, Larry Ellison. “The Oracle Database once again delivered solid revenue growth in FY21. And while our Oracle Database business as measured by revenue currently dwarfs our MySQL database business—that is about to change because the latest version of Oracle MySQL has been upgraded to include a revolutionary new ultra-high-performance parallel processing query engine called HeatWave. Independent analysts have tested and confirmed that Oracle MySQL with HeatWave runs 10 to 100 times faster than Amazon’s version of MySQL called Aurora. This technological breakthrough is causing several of Amazon’s customers to start moving their Aurora workloads to Oracle MySQL. And industry analysts are telling us they are seeing a 10x increase in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure customer inquiries. Both the Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle MySQL with HeatWave technology have captured the technology high-ground in the cloud database business—and that bodes well for the future of the Oracle Cloud.”
As the global pandemic has accelerated cloud adoption, Microsoft Azure and AWS have emerged as the clear winners.
Flexera has released its 2021 State of Tech Spend Report. As expected, digital transformation and cloud adoption are on the rise. Some 56% of respondents said digital transformation was a top initiative for 2021, as opposed to 54% in 2020. Cloud adoption saw even greater jump, with 48% of respondents making it a top priority in 2021, vs 40% in 2020. Not surprisingly, work from home was the single biggest driver for change, with 74% citing it as the leading factor.
Of the cloud providers, Microsoft Azure and AWS were the clear winners. Some 61% of respondents said they were going to increase spending on Microsoft Azure in 2021. Similarly, 57% plan on increasing their spending on Microsoft SaaS, while 54% plan on spending more on AWS. Google appears set for more modest gains, with only 31% planning on increased spending on Google Cloud.
The forecast looks even worse for IBM and Oracle. Respondents plan on increasing their spending on IBM Cloud a mere 16%, with 14% planning to decrease spending. While 20% said they planned on increasing spending on Oracle Infrastructure Cloud, 13% plan on decreased spending. The outlook is even worse for Oracle Licensed Software, with 22% planning to increase spending, as opposed to 25% planning to decrease expenditures.
Flexera’s report is an important look into the cloud industry and the ongoing digital transformation, and is even better news for Microsoft and AWS.
It’s no secret that Oracle has its sights set on the cloud infrastructure market, which is currently dominated by Microsoft and Amazon. Oracle’s latest attempt to pry open the market is their most ambitious yet.
On September 16, Oracle announced a new, free tier of cloud services, paired with credits developers can use for additional options. Free plans come with two virtual machines with 1/8 OCPU and 1 GB of memory each, along with the choice of Autonomous Transaction Processing or Autonomous Data Warehouse. This gives developers two databases, each with 1 OCPU and 20 GB of storage.
The Oracle Cloud Free Trial Credits, a $300 value, can be used on infrastructure, databases, application development, analytics, content, and experience, management and security or integration.
Until now, Oracle has had little success convincing developers to jump ship from Microsoft or Amazon. These new plans, however, could be a game-changer. The goal is to provide a way for developers to try Oracle’s services risk-free, instead of being forced to choose between committing to an untested solution or going with one of the industry leaders.
The Autonomous Database feature, in particular, is sure to drive growth. The feature has already been a solid hit with existing customers and offers companies with on-premise databases a clear path to the cloud.
Even if Oracle’s free tier of services doesn’t unseat one of the established leaders, it should help the company carve out a healthy segment of the market.
Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison says that Amazon does not even use their own database to run their business. “Amazon runs their entire business on top of Oracle, on top of the Oracle Database,” Ellison said. “They have been unable to migrate to AWS because it is not good enough.”
Larry Ellison, Oracle co-founder, discussed why Oracle is still the best database in the world and why it’s significantly better than Amazon and SAP databases in an interview this morning:
Amazon Does Not Use AWS to Run Their Business
Sometimes I liken the computer industry to the fashion industry. Certain brands get popular, certain brands get unpopular. IBM when I first came into the industry was the ultimate brand. It was not a company against whom you would compete, it was the environment which you would compete. Amazon now is the number one brand in infrastructure cloud computing.
Let me tell you an interesting fact. Amazon does not use AWS to run their business. Amazon runs their entire business on top of Oracle, on top of the Oracle Database. They have been unable to migrate to AWS because it is not good enough. I keep saying this because they just spent another 50 million dollars last year buying still more Oracle Database. I keep saying this because well maybe our database is better than Amazon’s databases. Why else would Amazon keep buying our database?
Last year they bravely said that they are sick of these comments of mine and they are going to move off of Oracle. They said they are going to move off of Oracle by 2020. Well guess what, they took their first step, they just moved a bunch of their warehouses off of Oracle and guess what happened. I will send you a copy of Amazon’s internal memo. It went down. It failed. They had a huge outage. They said that if they would have stayed with the Oracle Database this wouldn’t have happened.
All of the World’s Most Valuable Data Runs on Oracle, Not Amazon
The Oracle Database manages most of the world’s data, today and ten years ago. Nothing has changed. All of the world’s important valuable data is in an Oracle Database. They’re not in Amazon’s database. Amazon won’t use its own database to run its business.
So if our database is so great what have we done wrong? We didn’t get our database to the cloud quickly enough. If you wanted a cloud database, you had to go to Amazon for a database. Then you were able to go to Microsoft for a database. It took a while for us to build a secure cloud. It’s really hard to build a secure cloud. We think we are there now.
We have by far and away the best database in the world. Nothing is close. We show a series of benchmarks where we are ten times faster than Amazon. More importantly, we are ten times cheaper to run the same exact thing on Amazon on our database. So if you want all that security and want all that reliability, you have to be able to spend less. That’s what we’ve shown in a series of benchmarks. Even Amazon can’t move.
People say that Oracle has no chance in database and Amazon’s going to dominate everything, well you would think that one of the early customers that Amazon would move, how about Amazon. No, Amazon picked Oracle.
We Have a 10-20 Year Lead on Amazon
We think we have a 10-20 year lead on Amazon on databases. Let me prove it. Another thing, Amazon uses Oracle not Amazon. Amazon’s transaction processing database that they have is called Aurora. Aurora is an open source database. They just it picked up and made it closed source on Amazon. They didn’t write any of that. They picked up Aurora, put it on Amazon and made it available on their cloud. Well, so who owns Aurora? Who develops Aurora? That would be Oracle. It’s called MySQL. That’s our small open source database which they claim is their big transaction processing database that’s going to replace Oracle. It’s just preposterous that Amazon didn’t even develop the Amazon database. It’s just a chunk of open source that we are responsible for called MySQL. MySQL does not compare to the Oracle Database. There is a reason Amazon uses Oracle.
SAP Also Uses Oracle Everywhere
You know who else uses Oracle? Another company that hates us, SAP uses Oracle everywhere. SAP ten years ago said I hate Oracle, I’m getting off of Oracle, I can’t stand these guys, especially this guy that goes on TV and makes fun of us. They say we have this great new database called Hanna. It’s awesome. Well, they have all of these cloud services such as SuccessFactors. Does it run on Hanna? But oh no, it runs on Oracle. Actually, 98 percent of everything SAP does runs on Oracle. A decade later, they still use Oracle, can’t get to Hanna.
The Oracle Database beat IBM in the database business and beat Microsoft in the database business. We’ve been in this business for 20 years constantly making our database better. Now it’s the world’s first autonomous system.
The Oracle Database is Much Better Than Anyone Else Has
The EU actually did a study, of the top hundred SAP customers in Europe how many of them run the Oracle Database? Only 99 percent. One actually ran IBM DB2. All of their cloud services, whether it’s SuccessFactors, Ariba, all of these things which they’ve been trying to get off of Oracle and onto Hanna for a decade still all run Oracle. The reason is that Oracle is just a much better database than anyone else has.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was asked if I can have any other piece of software in the world what would it be? Everyone thought he was going to say Google Search. He said the Oracle Database because it’s the information age and all of the world’s most valuable information is stored in an Oracle Database.
Oracle CEO Mark Hurd says that because they have a founder like Larry Ellison they are focused on generational changes. “At the end of the day what’s in our DNA deeply is to build for the future,” said Hurd.
Mark Hurd, Oracle CEO, discussed Oracle’s growth strategy in an interview earlier today:
We have a technical strategy. It’s very important in a technology company that you have a technology strategy. When you listen to companies that say here’s our strategy, produce a lot of cash flow, buy back stock, increase our dividend… that not a technology strategy.
Lead in Cloud Applications and Database Technology
Our strategy is to lead the applications market as it moves to the cloud and lead the movement of database technology as it moves to the cloud. I think our strategy is irrefutable. That said, almost everything in our company is at some stage in transition, moving from the old model to the new model. The company is going to grow its revenue and applications is just one example of that.
Our DNA is to Build for the Future
When you have a founder like Larry Ellison he’s very focused on generational changes. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about Quarter or care about our year, but at the end of the day what’s in our DNA deeply is to build for the future.
We have in some cases given away revenue that we could have had in the interest of moving our business to where we think the market is headed. If our sole objective was to grow our revenue on a quarterly basis we wouldn’t have deemphasized many of our businesses in order to pursue where we think the market is headed years from now.
If we Were Only Focused on the Short-Term Numbers…
We wouldn’t have made the applications transition. Our applications business is now in aggregate growing double digits. We could have stayed on the old model and probably had some short-term growth better than we had when we went through the transition. But it wouldn’t be where we want to be five years from now.
We’ve pretty much played the long game at every chance to move to where the market is headed. It will result in long-term revenue growth as our legacy businesses as a percent of our revenue goes down.
We Have No Business in Oracle Growing at the Rate of Oracle
We have no business in Oracle growing at the growth rate of Oracle. We have businesses either growing 40 percent or declining 30 percent and as you mix them up you get to the result of Oracle.
As those businesses become a smaller part of our total and the growth businesses become a bigger part of the total revenue will grow. One thing you can say when you look at the numbers is that when we hit revenue growth we know how to turn it into cash flow and earnings.
There Will Be Extreme Growth for Us
Executing the applications strategy, moving our customers, and then taking other peoples customers into the more modern world of SAT, there will be extreme growth for us. The ability to move our database to Gen 2 Oracle cloud infrastructure and Autonomous Database is actually more growth opportunity than the applications business. Just executing those two things is huge for us.
