Larry Ellison’s Oracle has been feeling the pinch as of late with the recent loss of some huge contracts. Oracle who has always been known for its database application and has centered its business around big data buying companies like Sun, Micros, MySQL, and Virtualbox.
While Oracle has always competed with Microsoft and IBM lately they have been feeling the pinch losing customers to cloud-based services despite offering their own cloud services. Oracle offers services like Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS with their latest autonomous database and NoSQL database but the services have not gotten much traction for the company outside of existing users. Many people including myself cannot understand why Oracle can’t get traction in a market they created.
Oracle took a big hit when Amazon made the announcement that they plan to move off Oracle completely by 2020. Not too long after that Salesforce made an announcement that they had a long term goal to move off of Oracle. Oracle this week took a hit when Warren Buffett sold off Berkshire’s 2.1 billion dollar stake in the Oracle.
Most recently Oracle lost a 10 billion dollar contract to AWS Amazon Web Services from the Pentagon. Microsoft just has landed a huge $1.76 billion cloud computing contract from the U.S. Department of Defense under which it will provide an array of services to several agencies over the next five years.
Oracle using purchases, contracts and application compatibility has managed to keep many customers on their platform but I am not sure for how long. Just like IBM they have their existing users and can use acquisitions to get more customers but their core business will not see much growth unless they can get a cloud product that can attract new customers instead just moving over existing ones which is not a sustainable business model.