Oracle market share dropped from 36% to 16% of the total database Market between 2017 and today. Oracle didn't lose customers, it just didn't catch any of the new cloud customers. Oracle cloud represents a laughable 1.6% of the total cloud market. That is sad, really sad because the entire database market doubled because of cloud. It went from 40 billion to 80 billion 2017-2021, the vast majority of that was all in cloud.
Oracle did not invest infrastructure, instead they rented space in Equinix data centers. They assumed they could win the cloud war with "better software." What a joke. When I worked at Oracle in 2017 a customer asked how quickly they could get started if they ordered and Exadata that very day. I didn't have an answer but did some digging internally. The Ashburn datacenter (rented from Equinix) was at capacity. The customer would order the Exadata Oracle would build it and drop ship it with in 6 weeks. How's that for an elastic cloud?
I am glad I left Oracle... it's tu-d of a company. I got laid off and got a nice severance package too. Thank you, Oracle!
Merv Adrian wrote an excellent Gartner blog article that shows Oracle missed the cloud and that reduced its total database market share from 36% in 2017 to 20% in 2021.
Oracle lost 16 percentage points of total database market share over that 5 year period.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-12/oracle-s-database-dominance-eroded-by-rise-of-cloud-first-rivals
When Shutterfly decided recently to move the database where it clusters reams of customer photos to the cloud, one name was noticeably absent from its list of potential providers: Oracle Corp.
The company had for years relied on Oracle products to manage the photo libraries of its more than 20 million active customers. But as Shutterfly progressed on the effort to switch its systems to internet-based services from Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud division, Chief Technology Officer Moudy Elbayadi recognized it also needed to shift its database to something that was easier to use.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/new-gartner-report-shows-massive-growth-database-market-fueled-cloud/
See ya Oracle! Its time to fade away.