CLOUD WARS — Enterprise-tech heavyweights Oracle and Microsoft each jumped into the red-hot market for blockchain digital technology on the very same day, and one of them looks fully prepared (that would be Microsoft) while the other looks like it’s desperately trying to play catchup (that would be Oracle).
One of the reasons Microsoft is #1 on my Cloud Wars Top 10 rankings and Oracle is #6 is that Microsoft, under CEO Satya Nadella, has mastered the ability to articulate its deep technology in the context of business problems and opportunities its customers and prospects are facing.
Nadella has become almost unmatched at this ability—only SAP CEO Bill McDermott and Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff can match him—and it’s clearly been a huge factor in driving Microsoft’s booming cloud business, which Nadella says will reach $20 billion for the 12 months ending June 30, 2018.
Bob EvansMicrosoft’s aggressive and full integrated move into blockchain gives Azure another big boost.
By contrast, Oracle clearly has remarkable technogical prowess, but often seems either unable or unwilling to portray all that knowhow in the context of what business customers want and need.
Consider CEO Mark Hurd’s utterly baffling comments in mid-June about the hottest technology in enterprise computing today—AI, or Artificial Intelligence—in which he not only dismisses the term “AI” in favor of his market-of-one preference for the term “pattern matching,” but also says that the big objective for AI is to weave it into applications.
Stating the stunningly obvious during a CNBC interview, Hurd—who could have said anything under the sun about this truly transformational technology—could come up with only this: “We believe the application of AI, pattern matching, whatever word you want to use for the technology … is really getting it integrated and embedded into the applications.”
By contrast, Microsoft goes to great lengths to describe what it is offering and where and how that new product or service fits into the spectrum of business challenges and growth opportunities its enterprise customers are dealing with. And the blockchain launch offers a perfect example of that.
On August 10, Microsoft—in concert with tech giant Intel—announced a sweeping set of open-source blockchain plans within its Azure cloud-computing family and offered an eloquent outline of its plans in a blog post from Azure CTO Mark Russinovich that included this overview:
“A growing number of enterprises are investing in blockchain as a secure and transparent way to digitally track the ownership of assets across trust boundaries and to collaborate on shared business processes, opening up new opportunities for cross-organizational collaboration and imaginative new business models.”
In a simultaneous announcement, Microsoft blockchain partner and collaborator Intel said Microsoft’s blockchain framework “integrates Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX) to deliver improved transaction speed, scale and data confidentiality to enterprises. This first-of-its-kind innovation accelerates the enterprise readiness of blockchain technology, allowing developers to create flexible and more secure enterprise blockchain applications that can be easily managed by businesses.”
Hammering home the notion that Microsoft’s plans for blockchain are centered on making it easy and secure for businesses of any size to deploy blockchain, Azure CTO Russinovich said in his blog post that “Our mission is to help companies thrive in this new era of secure multi-party computation by delivering open, scalable platforms and services that any company—from ledger startups to retailers to health providers to global banks—can use to improve shared business processes.”
All in all, a pretty cohesive plan from Microsoft, whose communications to customers about its blockchain plans included the blog post and its heavy emphasis on businesses benefits, plus the coordinated announcement with Intel, plus a YouTube demo of Coco by Russinovich.
Meanwhile, what was Oracle’s message about its leap into blockchain? How did Oracle articulate its intentions for what its forthcoming Blockchain Cloud Services would mean for businesses?
Never a fan of taking the most-direct route, Oracle posted an entry headlined Oracle Cements Interest On Blockchain: Joins Hyperledger on its “AppDev, PaaS and Fusion Middleware” blog. It was written not by president of product development Thomas Kurian nor by some other senior executive, but by product marketing director Eric Jacobsen, no doubt a terrific guy but clearly not a top-level player in the Oracle cloud firmament.
It’s interesting to note that Oracle made the focus of its “news” its decision to join the Hyperledger consortium of blockchain vendors, rather than emphasizing, as Microsoft and Intel did, the potential benefits to customers that blockchain can offer.
Jacobsen’s post didn’t mention the Oracle Blockchain Service until the third paragraph—perhaps he held off on that because the service isn’t ready yet, and Oracle’s not willing to discuss when it will be ready, whereas Microsoft has its Coco Framework and partnerships up and running.
His post also outlined the four objectives of Oracle’s blockchain strategy:
“1. To address mission-critical enterprise needs such as scalability, security, robustness, integration, and performance to remove barriers to adoption and support blockchain applications in production.
“2. To make it easy for customers to deploy, configure, manage and monitor blockchain and reduce the cost for deploying blockchain in enterprises by offering it as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) Cloud solution.”
The third objective is to boost Oracle’s Cloud App Dev platform, and the fourth is to help customers using Oracle SaaS apps to weave the as-yet-unavailable Oracle Blockchain Cloud Services into their processes.
So as of now, Oracle finally has a blockchain plan, but the company has said nothing about when that proposed cloud service will be available, or how it will work. That is, perhaps, better than nothing, but for business decision-makers racing to master the intricacies of digital business with the most-capable and advanced tools, it’s not muchbetter than nothing.
Paradoxically, the strongest evangelism for Oracle blockchain is coming from a fintech and blockchain technologist who had spent several years working with some of the world’s biggest systems integrators on Salesforce.com apps.
Jiri Kram’s LinkedIn profile says he’s currently CEO of Silicon Wharf Consulting Ltd., which “helps companies design, architect and deliver enterprise grade blockchain and Fintech solutions in the Cloud.”
Last week, Kram posted an article on LinkedIn called Oracle’s move to blockchain confirms their cloud superiority in which he described a how a customer project he was unsuccessfully attempting to build on Salesforce.com was able to flourish when he began using the Oracle platform. At the top of his piece, he offers this synopsis: “Untold story of Oracle’s Blockchain: Every story has a beginning. Here is our journey from Salesforce to Oracle.”
Kram’s article is particularly bullish on Oracle’s Bare Metal service, which he says greatly simplified his project and allowed him to move across clouds with ease—a much-desired capability that, he emphasized, is much too rare these days.
“Another reason why, as the CTO of a Fintech start-up, I love Oracle is they solved my headache,” wrote Kram. “As I wrote previously, our project started on Salesforce. In the old world before the Oracle Cloud we would simply lose all the code and customisations because of moving to the new platform. Not with Oracle!”
Well, as is always the case in the Cloud Wars, individual battles don’t determine the ultimate winner. But Oracle is already far behind Microsoft in the overall enterprise-cloud marketplace, and its awkward messaging and planning about its move into blockchain will certainly do nothing to close that gap.
