While Oracle chairman Larry Ellison has become legendary due to his technological and strategic vision, his keynote at this week’s CloudWorld also produced a couple of linguistic innovations that are likely to become classics.
Discussing the multi-cloud phenomenon, Ellison referred to its ultimate manifestation as “an internet of clouds” that will create great value for customers, while the original clouds were “walled gardens” designed to breed isolation and complexity.
Beyond the novelty of those terms, Ellison’s larger point was about the enormous benefits customers can gain when different clouds are designed to work together seamlessly, thereby allowing customers to pick and choose the best specific clouds and/or solutions for their particular business needs.
That point was amplified in detail later in the event by Executive Vice-President Clay Magouyrk, who, during a Q&A session, said that the rapid maturation of the cloud will soon lead to universal adoption of multi-cloud as an essential business capability.
“We currently put up with this lack of basic multi-cloud interoperability because we’re so early in the development of the cloud,” Magouyrk said.
“Today, the fact that clouds don’t work well together — or work together at all — leads to higher costs and greater complexity for our customers.
“So we’re going to fix that — we’re committed to fixing it, and we don’t care if other cloud providers do so or not. Customers need diversity of choice among clouds, and we’re going to make sure they have that.
“So this ‘internet of clouds’ idea will happen, and we have to make it all work together,” Magouyrk said.
In that context, Ellison said that the “era of multicloud” began when Oracle and Microsoft created their cloud-interconnect partnership a couple of years ago. Calling that initiative just the beginning, Ellison went on to describe the changes that need to occur for the “internet of clouds” to become a reality.
“The original clouds were walled gardens. Moving data in seemed like a good idea, but then customers found that moving data out was a bad idea because of the fees associated with it. Those ingress and egress fees—that was the beginning of true multi-cloud.”
Ellison said the interconnect with Microsoft included not only tech innovations such as high-speed and low-latency broadband but also the elimination of data ingress and egress fees.
And the new Azure Database service is “not only free and fast but also easy,” Ellison said.
“That’s really the way this should work, this internet of clouds — customers should be completely free to mix and match, and choose the services that best suit their needs.
“And those garden walls will come tumbling down.”
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