| Right. So most folks here aren't following the "enterprise" space too much, but disclaimer: I work at Workday, a direct competitor to Oracle in the Business Management (ERP) software space. My background's in hosting & infrastructure. Oracle are losing a lot of Oracle database licenses at the enterprise level and when they look around, the "cloud" is one of the main reasons why. They sell a bunch of jumped up 1990's applications which are mostly thin, crappy wrappers around a sophisticated database and their database, despite a lot of accounting and sales tactics that say otherwise, is still their main earner. You can't, unfortunately, see that anywhere, however, so I can't cite anything :-) So, enterprise customers, who are mostly the people buying their database are moving towards the "cloud" eating some of Oracle's lunch. As a result, Oracle sees a growth opportunity in the "Cloud" arena - both on the infrastructure (AWS) and the application space (ERP). https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/database-bench... So they recently bought Dyn, Palerra & LogFire so you can see a pattern here. Dyn are just more "internet famous", but this is a pattern [1] Lots and lots of talk recently from Ellison about their strategy. http://www.networkworld.com/article/3123408/cloud-computing/...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/oracle/2016/10/17/larry-ellisons... It'll be interesting to see the duck tape and glue they use to jam all this crap together, but I think they're fighting an uphill battle with an incumbent that's years ahead of them on the product side. However, this is Enterprise world, and best product definitely does not always win. Oracle have a long history of selling successfully to Enterprises through fairly aggressive sales tactics. I'm not surprised if they see a market opportunity given how unfriendly AWS & GCE can be from an enterprise perspective. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle |