Jeff Steiner

And to say that you're going to go to cloud where you're just going to transplant your entire environment into the cloud and sort of operate it as is, that's not really what cloud is intended to be.

If you're going to move your databases into the cloud, what you should really be trying to do is move the database into the cloud where you no longer know nor care where it is.

You just have a SQL connection to your database and there's certain SLAs and your service provider will live up to their commitments.

Same thing with your applications.

You shouldn't have to go and install some application on a Red Hat Linux server inside of AWS.

You should just have the whole application disappear.

And this is what I think is honestly the threat of something like Oracle Cloud, because it is a viable option for some customers.

And this has been true for years since it was called Oracle On Demand.

It's a viable option for a customer to decide, you know what, I'm not going to buy anything from anybody.

I'm just going to go and sign up for a database and an application server in the Oracle Cloud.

And I know Oracle would like to make that real.

I think some of it is a little schizophrenia on the part of Oracle because they make a huge amount of money from the on-site licenses, and obviously they still have a hardware division.

They can't just shut everything down and shunt everybody over to the cloud.

And the other problem is their cloud is just not what Amazon's cloud is.

It doesn't scale to that level.

It doesn't have that level of flexibility, nor should it.

They're not trying to be the commodity of the cloud.

They're trying to build a cloud that runs application servers and databases and a few select services around that.

There's a lot of competition with that.

Not everyone wants to put everything in the hands of Oracle.