Oracle: We're cheaper for cloud than Amazon, Microsoft and, indeed, anyone else

Oracle cloud leader Bernard Wheeler touts the company as the most cost-effective cloud one-stop shop

Oracle is the most cost-effective cloud provider with prices some 20 per cent cheaper than Amazon Web Services (AWS) and, indeed, is the cheapest of all the major cloud services companies.

That is according to Bernard Wheeler (pictured), an experienced Oracle cloud leader, speaking this week at Computing's Cloud & Infrastructure Summit 2016.

"If you look at like-for-like cloud prices Oracle is, in fact, one of the cheapest in the market. It is 20 per cent cheaper than Amazon; it is 20 per cent or thereabouts cheaper than Microsoft," he claimed.

"There's various different studies. Accenture came up with some really quite alarming figures, which I don't have to hand, but in order to get an environment in Amazon that performs quite as well as Oracle would cost you quite a lot more," he continued.

Likewise, while organisations could cut costs by using free to acquire databases, such as MySQL - which Oracle is also responsible for - there are other costs to consider in addition to licensing.

"That's a whole different argument, though, about open source versus ‘charge to acquire'," he added, "when you have the support and innovation being done by a substantial vendor with huge sums of money to invest on research and development."

Wheeler was responding to a question from a member of the audience: "Oracle has a reputation for, to put it politely, not being cheap. Is it wise to lift-and-shift an entire IT infrastructure into one company's cloud?"

It comes after Oracle founder and executive chairman Larry Ellison claimed earlier this week at the company's own Oracle OpenWorld event in San Francisco that Oracle had not only caught up with AWS in cloud, but overtaken it.

The company has also been aggressively expanding in the cloud with a number of big acquisitions, including just this week the acquisition of Palerra, a company specialising in cloud management and security.

Earlier, Wheeler had suggested that while hybrid cloud - running different key elements of IT infrastructure in-house and in the cloud - sounded fine in theory, the practice was typically much more complicated.

"Hybrid is really difficult," he warned. "It effectively involves building a bridge between different ‘worlds'."

Building a hybrid cloud is like an entirely new data centre, he warned, in which everything will be unfamiliar to existing staff. "It's not an easy problem to solve; there are no silver bullets for it.

"Yes, you can have management infrastructures to enable you to look across the two of them, but that doesn't take account of the skills need, for one set of skills in your data centre and another set of skills for the public cloud."

The upshot, he said, is two sets of rules, two sets of governance and an increase in complexity and delays.