Oracle Autonomous Cloud Database Has Huge Potential, Says Larry Ellison

CLOUD WARS -- While Oracle's spent the past year talking up the power and potential of its self-driving database, the company's released few details about how business customers are responding to a product that is so strategic that chairman Larry Ellison has said it's one of two cloud products that will determine the future of the company.

"Oracle has two strategic products that will determine our future," Ellison said in his prepared remarks at the beginning of Oracle's recent earnings call.

"Our Cloud ERP product is the strategic key to our success in the SaaS applications layer of the Cloud, and our Autonomous Cloud Database is the strategic key to our success in the IaaS or infrastructure layer of the Cloud." 

That bold claim and its implications resurfaced later in the call during the Q&A session when Ellison was asked how database customers are responding to the more-rapid rollout of new database technologies and enhancements in the cloud.

"We're delivering our technology in the cloud prior to making it available on-premises because it's easier to get our cloud product out and make it available to a large number of customers for development of new applications and for the lift-and-shift of existing applications," Ellison said in reply.

"So a lot of our customers are now experimenting with a data warehouse here, and there's now an OLTP system that's available with the Autonomous Database and they're in the process of trying that out in the cloud as well."

And in one of those experiments involving the Autonomous Database running on Oracle's Exadata system, Ellison said, the result was an eye-popping performance increase of 5x due in large part to machine-learning algorithms fine-tuning the technology.

"We’ve gotten a lot of people that were very, very surprised—we've had very positive feedback," Ellison said. "I think the strangest one for me was someone who was running Exadata on-premises, which is theoretically the fastest system on which you can run the Oracle Database. 

"They moved to it the Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud, which, by the way, also runs on Exadata in the Cloud, and they got a five times performance increase. 

It’s simply that the machine learning tuning for the Autonomous Database is just better than [that done by] human beings. And they were shocked," Ellison said.

"And so now they’re moving additional workloads to the Oracle Cloud."

Ellison cautioned that it's still "pretty early days" for the Autonomous Cloud Database, and that's true for at least these three reasons:

1.    All database-replacement projects are complicated, risky, and mission-critical.

2.    An additional layer of risk and complexity comes in moving a database from traditional on-premises systems to the cloud.

3.    And, to make it even more interesting, the Autonomous Cloud Database is a brand-new service built on technology yet to be proven in the real world of enterprise computing. 

"I think the fact that we can upgrade these things faster will actually increase the adoption rate, albeit now, I've got to confess, these are pretty early days," Ellison said.

"But we have tens of thousands of database customers, and an awful lot of them are now moving their first workload and experimenting with their first workload in the Cloud. Once they get through that process, I think we’ll have a very, very rapid migration of workloads from on-premises into the Oracle Cloud."