Larry Ellison, the executive chairman and CTO of Oracle, was omnipresent at Oracle OpenWorld this week, delivering two compelling keynote addresses and answering customers’ questions at the event’s Leaders Circle forum.
As always, Ellison didn’t mince words in laying out his technology worldview, calling out rival Amazon.com, hammering on the rising importance of information security, and sharing business lessons learned from a life of sailing. Here are five highlights:
IT as Utility Service Is Now a Reality
Amid the “generational shift” to cloud computing, the IT industry is catching up to the way the world’s other major utility industries have worked for decades, Ellison said. Just as every home or company doesn’t have its own water well or power plant, most companies won’t run their own data centers.
“We take advantage of economies of scale and specialized labor and get better service at a lower price by having our water come from a utility, by having our electricity come from a utility,” Ellison said. “And we’ll experience the same economic advantages, the same quality advantages, as we get our data from an information utility.”
Utilities, he noted, hide all the back-end technical complexity, whether it’s for filtering water, generating electricity, or running servers. “They do that all behind the scenes and deliver their service through a very, very simple device at the other end of a simple network—a faucet, a plug, or in this case, a smartphone or a web browser,” Ellison said.
Security Continues to Be Job 1
“Guess what—our next presidential election might be decided by Vladimir Putin. You think security’s important? How can one guy determine who’s going to be president of the United States?” Ellison asked rhetorically during his opening keynote. By leaking hacked emails about the two main candidates—“that’s how,” he said.
“Security might be the single most important issue customers face in migrating from their on-premises data centers to these cloud super data centers,” Ellison said. “And as they used to say at Ford a long time ago, security is job 1 here at Oracle with the move to the cloud.”
That’s been the case since day 1 at Oracle, almost 40 years ago, with the company’s first customer: the US Central Intelligence Agency. “Our second customer—and they’re also very serious about security—they don’t think Edward Snowden was a good employee. They would not rehire him,” Ellison said.
AWS Is More Closed Than the IBM Mainframe
Oracle Database runs in the Amazon cloud. Oracle develops the MySQL database and contributes back to the open source community. It develops its own version of Linux and contributes back to the open source community. Not so much with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Ellison said.
“People think that Amazon is open source,” he said. “They say [AWS] has a lot of open source software. They think Amazon and open source go together.” But they don’t, Ellison said.
“AWS is more closed than an IBM mainframe,” he said. “Now, someone would say that’s ridiculous. How can that be?”
Ellison explained. Back when IBM mainframes ruled the IT roost, Amdahl, Fujitsu, and Hitachi made IBM clones, so customers could lift their IBM mainframe workloads and run them on an Amdahl, Fujitsu, or Hitachi machine. “You had choices, but there is no choice with Amazon,” he said.
If you run workloads on AWS’s Redshift data warehouse platform, you can run them only in the Amazon cloud. “There is no choice whatsoever,” Ellison said. “Once you move into AWS, you cannot move out. If they raise prices, get out your checkbook.”
We’ll Bring Our Cloud To Your Premises
For companies that want the cost, performance, agility, and other benefits of Oracle’s public cloud but want to keep their IT workloads on premises for regulatory or other reasons, Oracle now offers some of the best of both worlds under a program called Oracle Cloud at Customer.
“We install these machines behind your firewall and attach them to your network, but they’re a subscription service just like in the public cloud,” Ellison said. “The best way to think about this is that it’s an extension of our public cloud that sits on your data center floor.”
Among the services Oracle will offer under the Oracle Cloud at Customer program are infrastructure (compute, block storage, virtual networking, file storage, messaging, identity management services), data management (database, Oracle Exadata machine, Hadoop services), and application development (Java, Ruby, PHP), as well as integration and management services.
The Oracle Cloud at Customer software and hardware are identical to the hardware and software in Oracle Cloud and on customers’ premises. Coexistence between on-premises and cloud workloads “is as transparent as possible,” Ellison said. “It’s the same thing. With one click, you can move data; one click, move applications; one click, add high availability to your applications.”
Business Lessons Learned from a Life of Sailing
Ellison, manager of the ORACLE TEAM USA syndicate that won the last two America’s Cup competitions, was an amateur sailor for most of his life, at one point driving his boat Sayonara to five world championships. “And then I made a very silly decision,” he said. “I decided to turn pro.”
Ellison quickly learned that it was one thing to compete against your friends and “a bunch of rich guys with boats,” but it was a whole other thing to race against the likes of Jimmy Spithill, Dean Barker, and Ben Ainslie at the highest level. Ellison realized he had to put in the work, training about six hours a day, four days a week, and traveling to regattas every weekend.
“It never stops. It’s constant work—constantly trying to figure out ways to improve your game,” he said. “Here at Oracle it means recruiting the best people, trying to make the best strategic decisions. Every day learning something new. Every day trying to find an opportunity that exists today that didn’t exist yesterday.
“Talent is nice, but the amount of work that’s required for success is incredible. Sailing for me was very easy in the beginning, but as soon as you go to the top level, it’s an astounding amount of work. But it’s worth it.”
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