Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
This episode is sponsored by Acceleration Economy’s AI Ecosystem Course, December 14. Discover how AI has created a new ecosystem of partnerships with a fresh spirit of customer-centric cocreation and renewed focus on reimagining what is possible.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I explore the transformative partnership between Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and how it might tilt the other cloud companies into becoming more customer-centric.
Highlights
00:41 —Two people who doing an astonishingly wonderful job at changing the nature of the business and technology world are Larry Ellison and Satya Nadella. A couple of the things they’ve done recently are going to turbocharge the already extraordinary generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) revolution.
01:38 — Four-and-a-half years ago, Ellison and Nadella agreed to do a “cloud interconnect.” A couple of months ago, Nadella and Ellison got together in person to announce the Oracle Database at Azure, a massive leap forward in this early commitment now, to give full, true, unconditional, multi-cloud support to customers.
02:22 — It’s a big step forward for other Cloud Wars Top 10 and any tech industry CEO to think about: “If this is going to be great for customers, should we allow our competitive battles in many areas to override our opportunity to do something really good for customers here?”
03:00— The stakes are so massive for cloud infrastructure, applications, databases, analytics, security, and much more. Yet, despite those massive multibillion-dollar competitive battles, Ellison and Nadella have figured out a way to make life better for customers. Ultimately, I think better for these companies.
04:02 — November of 2023: Microsoft announces in conjunction with Oracle that Microsoft has picked Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to do some AI training and inferencing for Microsoft brings conversational search. Nadella was bold enough to go outside the norms and say, “We’re gonna pick Oracle to do some of this along with Azure.”
04:36 — I think this takes incredible vision, courage, and a willingness to see a customer-centric future that others just aren’t yet seeing. Or maybe they’re seeing it but are unwilling to make the steps forward to do this. I think this is going to have huge ramifications across the tech industry.
05:43 — And maybe there are some competition taboos that it’s time for us to drop and work in entirely new ways. Fascinating times. We should all be feeling pretty lucky that we live in these sorts of times, to see this type of thing happening. It’s exciting. It’s bracing. I think it offers great optimism for the future.
