Why Microsoft Isn’t the Only Threat to Amazon’s Cloud Dominance

Earlier in this series, we discussed how Microsoft’s (MSFT) growing prominence has led to the downgrading of Amazon (AMZN) stock. We know that despite Amazon’s dominance, the next three players—Microsoft, IBM (IBM), and Google (GOOG)—grew their market share in 2016.

Although the outage that Amazon suffered on February 28 had nothing to do with its downgrade, it provided Microsoft and other players an opportunity to move ahead in the cloud space. As the second-place player in the cloud space, Microsoft could benefit the most. However, we believe it must ensure that its offerings aren’t impacted by outages.

Although Oracle (ORCL) isn’t included in the top five players in the space, it also considers AWS to be its chief rival.

In February 2017, Oracle doubled the cost of running its software in Amazon’s cloud environment. If AWS’s appeal is that it offers a cheaper route to the cloud, Oracle’s move to increase the cost of running its software on the Amazon cloud is aimed squarely at eroding that advantage.

The above chart compares various database offerings available on the market. Amazon’s Aurora, Redshift, and DynamoDB are not open source offerings.

In late 2016, Oracle launched the second generation of its IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) offering, Oracle Bare Metal Cloud. A public cloud offering, Bare Metal Cloud provides bare physical servers on which customers have the flexibility to run their chosen software. It interoperates with the current Oracle Cloud Platform services. 

When Bare Metal Cloud was launched, Oracle’s chief technology officer, Larry Ellison, stated, “Our Generation2 IaaS delivers twice the compute, twice the memory, four times the storage and ten times more I/O at a 20% lower price than Amazon Web Services.”