not enough data centers?

The idea that the only reason we needed to lower cloud forecast is that our data centers can't keep up with demand is complete fiction. Yes, it is true that our investment in data centers has been anemic and that has hurt our top line.

https://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/3008789/aws-oracles-cloud-investment-claims-dont-add-up

But this has been true for a long time. This is by design. The executive leadership team will only sign off on new CAPEX for the cloud when it is demonstrably hurting our top line a lot. We aren't a real cloud where we have the resources to scale to our customer's needs. We never intended to be. We never will be.

But like I said, that is nothing new. The real reason we can't keep up with expectations is that we basically cannibalised everything for the past two quarters. We have burned way too many bridges with our most valuable customer and our sales pipelines are drying up.

Most of our "cloud" revenue has been one-time credits that were booked as part of on-prem (non-cloud) deals. Sales people desperate to make their cloud quota will reengineer non-cloud deals to suddenly include a ton of cloud credits with steeply discounted on-prem licenses. Customers don('t complain because they are still getting all the on-prem licenses they bargained for at the same overall price. This practice is known as "cloudwashing", and Oracle is certainly not the only legacy IT vendor doing it. This is why we have been able to get away with so few data centers to begin with: very few of our "cloud customers" have ever used our cloud at all! If they do decide to try it out to see if they are interested, they see technology that is years if not a full decade behind our competitors. Our SaaS software just doesn't work: it's too buggy, doesn't have the features they want, is down all the time, and is WAY too slow. So our customers never renew these cloud contracts. When Amazon brings in a new user, they have a pretty good chance that the new customer will continue to pay them for years. We, not so much. Very few of our cloud customers ever renew anything in our cloud.

This means that their is very little recurring revenue in our cloud. Each quarter, we start from zero and need to fight to get new people to "buy" credits. Of course we have a FEW real cloud customers. And a number of places that lease our stuff for use in their own data centers that we somehow get away with calling "cloud". But most of our cloud revenue was a one-time thing that we will not be able to depend on. Our cloud is a revolving door for our customers. Growing it much farther than where it is today would require a revolution in how we do business and treat our customers. Our current leadership (LE, MH, SC, TK, ES) is simply neither capable nor motivated to drive such far-reaching changes.

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"fake news" the catchcry of people that don't want to believe something but have no evidence to back up their stance.

I predict the HR/marketing types will beat the "trying to short the stock FUDers??" thing for a while. When that no longer seems to be sticking, they'll go back to the "Fake News!" schtick. Oh, and then there's always the "You RIFers are just bitter" riff. (pun intended)

"Accurate criticism is one thing but throwing shade, and even worse, trying to create FUD because of ... oh ... maybe shorting stock?"

that's interesting. HR and marketing have changed the "this is all fake news" strategy with a brand new "create a doubt and uncertainty to hide the truth as much as possible" strategy.

maybe because if you say that something is a fake news and accidentally after 2 days the news is confirmed, that's no good.

John Fowler out? fake news. S12 delayed/canceled? fake news. M9 canceled? fake news. O laying off hundreds of HW engineers? fake news .... unfortunately all true news, and confirmed in too short time. not a good strategy after all.

a doubt and uncertainty is just what it is, and can live basically forever. good move HR and marketing, you got me impressed. I thought you were just as stupid as a bacterium. now I think you may have the intelligence of an amoeba, a good improvement indeed.

Yes this true, Oracle has been saving cash and not building out centers.

Accurate criticism is one thing but throwing shade, and even worse, trying to create FUD because of ... oh ... maybe shorting stock? .... beware of the FUDsters. Sure there is a critique one can make regarding the current infrastructure. But it's neither as deficient as some (FUDsters? Stock shorters?) imply here nor is it as good as some boosters imply. There you have it.

Don't even get me started - one cloud service may be available in the region but another may be in US only. Buying the network services to transfer the data may cost more than the cloud services combined. And you wonder why customers didn't renew?

After O bought SUNW, we feared we would lose our hard-fought test and training hardware. At least then you could repurpose an old system. Can't repurpose an old workstation into a cloud. In a way it shows that moving to the cloud is the ultimate lock-in. You are at their mercy even before the security crap starts kicking your behind.

I can't believe we got both SOC2 and HIPAA. Our SaaS security is so ridiculously bad. We don't even try to keep our customers safe at all.

Not only do tech support people at Oracle not have cloud accounts, but technical sales personnel like cloud architects (ECAs) don't have them either! They're assigned shared "demo" accounts, some of which don't work! How can a cloud architect do his/her job without real hands-on experience with the cloud services that they are supposed to be selling? Why don't they have accounts? Oracle doesn't have the capacity. The Gen1 cloud doesn't even have their own data center; they lease space from Equinix, and even then, this is in only two US data centers, Elk Grove and Ashburn. The Gen2 / Bare Metal cloud has a data center in Phoenix but also uses Ashburn for Disaster Recovery, but this is a very new and immature offering without many of the services offered by Gen1 or security certifications like SOC2 or HIPAA.

Good for her. She's made a ton of money by keeping Oracle from investing in its own future. I hope she buys herself something really nice.

Does she have her own island yet? like Larry?

Might be something to consider Safra....

What I keep reading in this forum is how the tech support people do not have access to create a cloud account to login to setup labs, report customer issues or for training. Is that true?

Good for her. She's made a ton of money by keeping Oracle from investing in its own future. I hope she buys herself something really nice.

SC does not believe in building data centers until they're needed. This is the reason for the long lead time when customers want to use their cloud credits and when they actually can. And a lot of this space is just leased from someone else's data center.

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not enough data centers?

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