back to article How is the big switch to the public cloud working out?

Remember The Big Switch – the book by Nicholas Carr which said that IT would become a utility-like service delivered through a socket in the office wall? We know it's only patchily working for business users, as public cloud adoption is going up but is still not a serious threat to on-premises giants. Both camps, the public …

  1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    "Neither has delivered a knock-out blow to the other"

    And that will never happen, simply because the world is a complicated place and no one solution is good for everyone all the time.

    Companies and people will find the Cloud useful for some use cases, on-premise for others. I'm convinced that any given single entity (company or individual) will find that it ends up using both, each kind for specific applications or use cases.

    And, in the end, that is what computing should be about : bringing the best solution to a given problem. It is not about bringing one solution and removing all the other possibilities.

    1. Julz

      Re: "Neither has delivered a knock-out blow to the other"

      But in the end, one or more possible technical solutions fade and die as one solution gains traction and the resulting ubiquity and lower cost makes the others the reserve of the niche markets. We can play which is the best / most suitable , processor architecture, operating system, programming language, network protocol, PC etc. but they are mostly dead issues with only a few choices now available. The live issue is which is going to be the dominant cloud architecture. I guess I've already consigned on premises to the niche...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "Neither has delivered a knock-out blow to the other"

      Working through our own adventures into cloud land we've found that through our own experiences and via consultant's advice that a hybrid is the option 90% of companies take at the outset, then slowly spot for things you can decomission and other things you need and so re-engineer. Despite all the PR bullshit there is no one solution and the reason so many cloud consultants, the good ones at any rate, are in such demand 'cos each company is unique and has unique challenges. Yes the cloud is the future but trying to leap into it with both feet at once will simply land you in a big pile of cloud-cuckoo poop!

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "Neither has delivered a knock-out blow to the other"

      "Chuck Hollis: Why aren’t the traditional on-prem vendors getting into the cloud game? The short answer: they can’t."

      Translation: We have hostages, they have customers.

  2. revilo

    circle of life

    The analogy with utility is deeply flawed. Information is not a utility. It can be (1) sensitive and (2) crucial (3) requiring big pipe capacities and (4) require a healthy IT culture to be handled properly. And we have returned back to where things started, only with new terminology: the "dumb terminals" have become "smart phones", the "main frame" is now the "cloud". We have played as a clueless kid on mainframes asking "mommy" (sysadmin) for computing time have been autonomously and educated and return now to the nursing home, paying the nurse (cloud provider) for every second of service (computing time).

  3. Naselus

    Frankly delusional.

    Several years ago, I had a job working for a tiny IT outfit, based in a disused mental hospital. We had a grand total of 8 staff - 2 support engineers, 2 Microsoft consultants, a web designer and 3 managers. All our business came from a single client, whom the managers had worked for years previously; they'd never managed to acquire any other clients at all. We were decidedly small-time, though the MD seemed to think we were a Big Player in the IT world.

    I'll always recall a Skype meeting with Microsoft's VP for Europe, when we were looking to renew our Gold Partner status, which we were not entitled to, since we didn't have enough MS-certified staff. Frustrated by the VP pointing this out, the MD blurted out 'We have engineers here who could be writing software that YOU could SELL!', quite ignoring the fact that not a single person in the building could code. The MS Veep simply sat in silence for about ten seconds, then carried on as if our MD hadn't just said something unfathomably stupid.

    THAT is the same level of delusion necessary to think that Oracle are going to be anything more than a bit player in cloud at this point.

    This guy talks about AWS as if it doesn't control more of the market - and is growing faster, in absolute terms - than the next 4 competitors combined. He talks about Azure as if it's some tiny, plucky competitor to Oracle, despite Azure being some 5 times the size of Big Red's offering. He barely mentions Google or IBM at all.

    I always kind of assumed that Oracle's approach to cloud, after having missed the boat through Larry's insistence it would come to nothing, is just to pretend like they know what their doing and have a Cunning Plan. This interview more or less confirms that, imo.

    1. Shameless Oracle Flack

      Re: Frankly delusional.

      You're missing it because as an infrastructure person, SaaS is invisible to you while at the same time it is slowly, silently eating your workloads. Oracle's combined SaaS/PaaS/IaaS cloud is $6 billion now and will likely hit $10 billion within 5-6 quarters, with SaaS growing at 70+% versus 40% IaaS growth at Amazon.

      As Chris points out, the whole cloud and on-premise battle will be playing out over the long run.

      1. yosemite

        Re: Frankly delusional.

        It's such a shame then that Oracle Fusion is so shite. It's hands down the worst designed and implemented pile of craps I ever had the (mis) pleasure of working with. And don't get me started on Oracle (un) support.

        Have any of you actually experienced this monumentally awful software?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Frankly delusional.

      "This guy talks about AWS as if it doesn't control more of the market - and is growing faster, in absolute terms - than the next 4 competitors combined."

      Just to point out that Microsoft overtook AWS in annual cloud run rate last quarter according to both company's results and Microsoft are growing much faster in cloud...

      1. Shameless Oracle Flack

        Re: Frankly delusional.

        Oracle's SaaS growth rate (70%) is almost twice the growth rate of AWS (~40%), which is 90% IaaS revenue. Large customers like AT&T have just begun to move their large Oracle workloads into our PaaS and IaaS public cloud. As Chuck states, it's all about platforms/franchises, which is why a lot of us at Oracle consider Microsoft our true (and worthy) competitor for moving on-premise workloads to the public cloud.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I guess I am fully on the side of the cloud and more and more storage being moved off fat-clients.

    I do not think that all fat-client use will disappear (some ad-hoc research on a linux/Mac/Win box with data from various sources: why not?).

    Which trends will slowly erode the non-cloud processes?

    1. Chromebook-generation is coming. Fully aware that some fun things are possible beside the Gdrive, but that you do not want to go off-cloud for the majority of your docs etc. because of all the manual management involved.

    2. Integration and its cost-savings easily outweigh off-line solutions. On a private use level: although some tasks will still be identified with hardware based thinking (my console/gaming computer etc.), but most users will become aware that if you want the same data available on your tablet, phone and computer you have to integrate the back-ends. To some extent this will be driven by the use of media at the current scale. It was possible to manage the family pictures on a harddrive in the past. Nowadays the amount of work involved will be astronomical. Private users will become aware that using clouds is cheaper, less work and more fun.

    3. On-premises will become less and less fun, because the customers will increasingly grab for their cards, rather than want to hire tech-expertise.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "Chromebook-generation is coming."

      It doesn't look like that so far. It's coming like the year of Linux on the desktop... Chrome hasn't made much impact anywhere really with th partial exception of the pitifully funded US school system.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Oracle barely registers in the Cloud market

    with a 5% market share, according to Mobilyia (slide 44).

    At Skyhigh it doesn't even register. It's bundled together with the "Others".

    In terms of adoption, Rightscale shows Oracle's market share shrinking from 4% in 2016 to 3% in 2017 (Public Cloud Adoption slide).

    Pronouncements of a 4%-market-share also-ran.

    1. Shameless Oracle Flack

      Re: Oracle barely registers in the Cloud market

      Once again, Oracle's public cloud includes SaaS/PaaS/IaaS as an integrated stack with a $6 billion per year run rate, growing at 70% per year. As Larry Ellison has stated, the profound price/performance and feature advantages of our IaaS cloud will ultimately make it the IaaS cloud of choice for enterprise applications.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Devil

        Re: Oracle barely registers in the Cloud market

        > $6 billion per year run rate, growing at 70% per year

        ROFLMAO!

        Pull the other one, Flacky!

        1. Shameless Oracle Flack

          Re: Oracle barely registers in the Cloud market

          While you're rolling on the floor Oracle investors are loading up on the stock and laughing all the way to the bank.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Oracle barely registers in the Cloud market

        "Oracle's public cloud includes SaaS/PaaS/IaaS as an integrated stack with a $6 billion per year run rate"

        Did Oracle move their customer license tracking system to it and bill themselves?

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "When I was at EMC, we thought of all sorts of clever ways to make our products work with other vendors’ clouds, but realized we were just making it easier for our customers to become someone else’s customers."

    The closed mainframe environment thought of the 1970's and 1980's have moved to the cloud. Lock them into your ecosystem and extract as much $$$ from them as you can. After all, going somewhere else would be too painful.

  7. The First Dave

    Why was this article 'illustrated' with a picture of a set of points?

    1. TheVogon

      Because it's a type of big switch?

  8. inquisitive2014

    Whoever ends up winning it will take 5 years to sort itself out. In the meantime there will be a lot of people with "Hybrid Cloud" ie some applications on-premise and some in the Cloud. Getting this environment to work seamlessly is the big challenge facing IT - both in terms of products and services as well as policy and procedures. We saw a tiny preview of this challenge when the corporate world was forced to accept Dropbox et al. Many users don't understand the challenges of managing enterprise IT for availability, performance, and security within a tight budget.

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