Larry Ellison's Biggest Battle: Amazon, Microsoft And SAP Grabbing Oracle Database Customers

Oracle founder and chairman Larry Ellison, shown here at his BNP Paribas Open tennis tournament in March. (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)

(Note: After an award-winning career in the media business covering the tech industry, Bob Evans was VP of Strategic Communications at SAP in 2011, and Chief Communications Officer at Oracle from 2012 to 2016. He now runs his own firm, Evans Strategic Communications LLC.)

CLOUD WARS -- For the past 20 years, Oracle databases have played major roles in running the world’s businesses: banking systems, airline-reservation systems, retail operations, telecom billing, government agencies, global supply chains, procurement systems, and more.

That database revenue accounts for about half of Oracle’s $37 billion annual revenue, according to analysts’ estimates, and during the good old “on-premise” days before cloud computing became all the rage, Oracle had built a near-impregnable moat around that massive database and workload revenue.

But the cloud is changing everything, and it is certainly shattering Oracle’s aura of invincibility in supplying the databases and related workloads that have become fundamental elements of the global economy.

So it is that in today’s cloud-first business environment, Oracle’s lean and hungry arch-competitors Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and SAP are all deeply committed to exploiting that cloud transformation to end Oracle’s near-hegemony in the database marketplace.

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