I migrated the company's services from AWS to OCI at the startup I was at. The trade-off is simple, if Oracle can say $product runs on OCI, they'll put you in front of the biggest industry players who are using their POS, database - and since our sales pipeline pivoted around web integrations this was crucial. They also give a bunch of credits (as do the other providers).

We argued against it in the dev team, but it wasn't the worst cloud migration I've done. The console reminds me of early days AWS as it's essentially just VPC+EC2+S3, but it was refreshing to spin up a server without a pages of config being presented to you. We took the opportunity to containerise our older sites and ran everything in their managed k8s cluster. I very rarely had to use the console for anything, which tbh is a bit of a grab-bag of managed services beyond the core cloud offering. Terraform support is there if you need to do anything serious.

This is great to hear, thanks for providing ground truth.

My guess is simply, they don't want to fund their own competitors. Microsoft is a direct competitor already (so is Google,) and who knows what Amazon will do. That really only leaves IBM and Oracle. I've always been baffled when someone hosts on their competitors' platform. Like Netflix hosting on AWS, and Grocery Stores hosting on AWS. Microsoft & Google rarely have that problem (except on this one.)

I’ve been impressed by what I’ve heard about Walmart. They apparently won’t even use a SaaS tool if it’s hosted on Amazon.

I worked at walmart labs for 3 years and that is correct. We had one, on premise, service that phoned home for license information to an AWS address and our request to whitelist the ip address had to go up to the CTO.

That’s changed hasn’t it? I remember going to a Walmart labs talk 5 years ago where they were all in on aws.

No. I don't think so. They really don't like AWS. It's all openstack/azure/gcp/vmware depending on the use case.

In my last job we used Basecamp for project management and then we started doing work for Walmart. They flat out said if you want to use a SaaS tool then they have to sign a liability agreement in case any trade secrets were leaked. Needless to say they said no as did everyone else. Which forced us into self hosting a ton of stuff.

Walmart uses a few big SaaS providers it’s weird they singled out Basecamp and self hosting. I built a couple integrations to Walmart’s SaaS products. We used off the self SaaS products hosted in the clouds too.

This was a few years ago right when Walmart Labs was taking off so their attitude probably changed some.

That makes sense. Even if private information isn't leaked, Amazon would still know things about usage and billing.

You can’t use AWS if you sell large amounts of stuff through Walmart either. One of my former clients demanded that we use Azure because of this.

You can use AWS, you just can't store any WalMart data there .. which is usually 30-90% of your data for your typical CPG.

Depending on how you define “store”, that basically means no AWS. This particular client understood this to mean no EC2, since data remains on disk, which cuts out the vast majority of the AWS offerings.

For this client the only AWS product we were cleared to use was Lambda, and only for integrating Alexis into the product.

Wow. That’s news to me. Walmart is so calculated.

It's just smart business.

Your random SaaS company is often a big shitshow. I've had more than one vendor Sales Engineer show me live customer data in response to performance or other questions. Startups and smaller SaaS companies in particular often demonstrate amazing levels of cluelessness.

We had an e-com SaaS company give us "sample product data" to help one our customers who was onboarding to their platform and was trying to figure out how to set up their product records and taxonomies, and the data turned out to be poorly anonymized real production data from one of our client's competitors who was also on the same SaaS platform.

I had that happen today.

That's pretty weird. AWS and Amazon's shop are two different companies. If they are afraid of leaking data, that two-hop scenario seems to be less of a problem than all the single-hop vendors they have themselves.

I used to work for a company that made POS and Self Checkouts. Walmart was a big customer and we had to make sure the stack didn’t have any AWS. Same with Target.

That, and likely Oracle is doing it for free (or thereabout), financing it out of their advertising budget.

Zoom is the success story of these corona-times of ours; the headline alone is marketing gold, particularly considering nobody else in the "startupsphere" will ever give Oracle this sort of visibility - or even the time of day. At a time when Oracle is trying to push an image of being startup-friendly, this is better than the alternatives (each word they tweet on "helping startups" unleashes waves of mean and snarky jokes).

> I've always been baffled when someone hosts on their competitors' platform. Like Netflix hosting on AWS

Netflix had a 5-day outage caused by issues with their private DC back in the day.

IT mgmt. decided their expertise wasn't in operating DC's, SV real estate was too expensive, and doing multi-region themselves was too expensive.

AWS was picked as it was the only viable cloud offering at the time, and the decision was made to be mono-cloud until later. (Azure was used for storing backups.)

Note that AWS was never used for large-scale streaming. Either a partner CDN was used, or now their own CDN.

Source: worked at Netflix.

From my recollection, Netflix started using AWS before Amazon launched Prime Video as well?

Amazon launched and killed a video project several years before prime video

Thanks! And that makes complete sense - even for a company with that scale and budget, there's some fights not worth fighting when you can get back to doing what you do well and let someone else deal with the stuff you'd have to spend a bunch of effort getting good at.

aws was used for storage and encoding initially. source: worked at aws

Encoding servers, but not streaming servers.

The well-known US CDNs were used for streaming.

Also, the cloud they picked doesn't matter because:

1) They used their own ASG UI, Asgard, since AWS initially didn't have one.

2) With around 1,000 engineers, they could migrate clouds at any time at a future date (or build their own CDN. There was no silo politics as in most other companies.)

I work primarily with grocery retailers, and this is quite accurate. Almost all of them have told us that they will not use any of our services if they are hosted in AWS. They used to be hesitant, but willing, but once Amazon acquired Whole Foods, it became a deal breaker.

> and who knows what Amazon will do.

Amazon already has Chime.

If you've ever used Chime, you know it's no threat.

If the amount of revenue you are going to give is a rounding error for AWS, you are not going to move the needle on the funding of their other projects. This should be a non-factor in your decision-making process.

Lots of insiders claim that amazon looks at its competitor's traffic and usage data for ideas. kinda like how grocery stores know which generics to make based on which types of foods do well.

That theory is discussed in other threads. I’m just responding to the “funding the competition” argument, which is a different angle.

You're right, in that the revenue of an incremental customer is negligible to them.

However, as a customer dependent on that particular vendor, one wants to make sure that their cloud provider has no perverse incentive to deprioritize issues one encounters.

^^ this * 1,000,000.

Smart move, really. Build a relationship. Better than funding the competition.

We can only speculate, but Zoom is really big in the news right now, so Oracle could have offered them a special deal so Oracle can be in the news too.

If you aren't knowledgeable enough about cloud providers to evaluate them directly on their merits, then you look for signals. Some people might think, hey, Zoom is doing well, they are a well-known, up-and-coming company, and they chose Oracle, from which we infer that Oracle must be good choice.

Pouring one out for the zoom devops crew now forced to work with Oracle cloud because of some high level partnership decision.

If they're smart they will maintain the ability to jump to IBM and play them off each other.

Amazon has Chime.

Not heard of it? You aren’t alone there.

I've heard nothing but negative reviews about Chime from amazon employee's whom have to use it daily...

So... Amazon employees are forced to use Chime for chat. It's crap for that and the Chime team doesn't care, it's not what their external customers care about.

Also, it's gotten much much better in the last 2 years. By the time I left, it's video was handily better than any non-zoom video chat I've tried, and competitive with zoom.

Disclaimer: I work at AWS.

I use Chime and love it. Its lack of features is a feature in my opinion. I used Slack for years before using Chime and I’m happy with the switch. I don’t get nearly the chat fatigue I used to get from Slack. Chime reminds me of HipChat and Campfire in terms of UX but with the availability you’d expect an AWS service to have.

As someone who recently did the remote on-site via Chime, its stability left a lot to be desired. Audio dropped regularly and constant video freezes. It felt a little half-baked and dog-fooded internally and, by extension, externally to interviewees. Nearly every person who interviewed me also expressed some unhappiness with Chime as well. This is all anecdotal, of course.

It mostly just feels like a byproduct of not-built-here syndrome.

anecdotally, having used it internally before I left. I found that VC stability top-notch, I had some stability problems using the web client, but those had mostly resolved within the few months before I left.

I now find my self yearning for the stability of Chime outside of using Zoom. and using Zoom, feel a concern for my privacy in a way I have never using an AWS product.

Meh, it's fine for 1:1 chat, but I hate it's group chat support. It's just messy and hard to manage. On the other hand, it's VC support is top notch.

I agree with that. I dislike having to start a new group chat just to add a new person.

Can't state that benefit enough. Zoom is draining right now. They shame participants into using video.

Chime's UX design really allows you to join calls without video and without the pressure.

It's great as video doesn't add much to a large conference call.

Google sees Zoom as competition (They recently updated Google Hangouts to compete with Zoom) so it won't make sense for them to host there.

Microsoft has Skype.

I am not sure about Amazon. Someone please enlighten us.

Amazon has Chime.

Is that another IoT doorbell thing they acquired?

Easy mnemonic, Chime is for when your softphone rings, and Ring is for when your doorbell chimes. Keep it straight.

Nah, chat and VC: https://aws.amazon.com/chime/

> I don' see a reason why Amazon or Azure would be passed over in favour of Oracle. Why wasn't GCP a contender either?

Because Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are competitors to Zoom. Why would you host on your competitor?!

Apple buys chips from Samsung.

Or at least they used to - I guess lately they are strictly reliant on TSMC?

https://wccftech.com/samsung-aiming-high-apple-a13-next-year...

https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/01/23/apple-boosts-chip-...

This is incorrect. Apple doesn't buy chips from Samsung or TSMC. Apple orders the chips to be manufactured by them. The chip design is made by Apple on their own.

Buying a chip from someone (i.e., purchasing rights to use an existing chip design made by someone) vs. ordering your own chip to be manufactured by someone are two different things.

It's like, we don't say that Apple just bought phones from Foxconn, they simply acted as a manufacturer.

Sure, my point is just that it's not insane to give money to another arm (pardon the pun) of a company you happen to be competing with, and in fact it happens all the time.

Apple still buys flash (I think) and sdram from Samsung.

Because their hosting companies aren't your competitor. Just because they have the same general brand name slapped on the label doesn't mean they are one company. At the same time, even if it were a competitor: does it matter? Your service superiority isn't based on whose computers it runs on, as long as it runs well.

Say it's about the money: then yes, you could in theory have a problem with that, but one way or the other you'll have a problem: if you work at zoom and someone has an xbox, uses windows or uses office you're still tied to that 'competitor'. It seems to me that the competitor is just that specific element (Teams, Skype) and not everything that happens to be close to me. But I'm no MBA and my perspective is probably not the most profitable one.

For starters, because Zoom's decision to go with either of those companies as a cloud supplier isn't going to have any impact on their competition as a conferencing service provider. It's not like Microsoft is going to go broke tomorrow and cancel teams if Zoom goes to Oracle.

More fundamentally because business is cooperative and not like a war, but like a game with many repetitions. So working with your competitors can be mutually beneficial. Business is not a zero-sum game, it's not like two villages in the walking dead going at each other.

Netflix and Spotify don't seem to have any problems. Cloud hosting is also at least a semi-important part of these businesses. I'm sure the contracts prevent outright abuse of the relationship, but more than that, if a cloud provider took advantage of that relationship, no one would host their again.

In a world of multinational conglomerates, it’s very common for a business to have a supplier that is owned by the owner of a competitor in a different line of business.

Tongue in check but my first thought was “baddies” work hand in hand with other “baddies”...

As for real reason, that’s a head scratcher...

Bandwidth is one of their main costs presumably, and most cloud providers charge inflated egress prices (though for something the size of Zoom I'm sure they'd negotiate).

The weakest market players are in the best position to cave to special terms for large customers.

Gcp is listed in the article but not the title. Strange title selection but they were considered.

I should have worded my question better, I was just surprised why you would leave out arguably the top 3 companies and go with something like Oracle. (Maybe I am too young and that's where my animosity for Oracle comes from, but I feel like they are way behind the curve in terms of their cloud).

Oh no, I totally have the same question. I just wanted to make it clear that GCP was in the running since that was in your comment.

But yea, I don't get it either. I'd be curious to know why.

free credits. I've heard of deals giving out $50mm+ in credits over five years before... also gives you some insight into AWS/GCP/Azure margins.

Good point. I wonder how deals like this are structured on the accounting backend.

Worth noting (from the article):

> Zoom already uses Amazon and Microsoft’s cloud services, but went with Oracle for its latest expansion.

Remember that Oracle’s Capex spending on cloud is very small compared to AWS, Azure and GCP. Given Zoom’s growth it’s not likely they’ll choose an also-ran in the public cloud market as their sole supplier.

Increasing optionality and maybe some access to Oracle marketing is likely a bigger reason.

> Increasing optionality and maybe some access to Oracle marketing is likely a bigger reason.

Yup, Larry Ellison himself recently endorsed Zoom, most likely as means to close the deal: https://youtu.be/u96GRtxBUUQ

Now they are in the news with this story ... that's valuable.

> Maybe they are afraid that Amazon or Microsoft with their tradition of copying competition would pose a threat?

For Amazon marketplace merchants, I get how Amazon using internal metrics to start carrying popular products is a problem. For Zoom, though? They're public, and they announce quarterly usage numbers. There's nothing to copy that they can't already see.

Amazon also own video-conference product Chime.

Did you not read the news that Amazon uses data to compete against its own customers?

That was specifically about the Amazon marketplace, not AWS.

AWS isn't that far off from following in the same path. Look at what they did with Elastic Search.

That has nothing to do with the subject being discussed. Unless you are saying their offering harvests customer data?

I have no inside knowledge about this, but I'd assume and expect AWS to only use customer metadata like resource utilization for capacity management and planning. Much more and they run into compliance issues with things like HIPPA, SOC 2, and PCI.

I'm out of the loop, what did they do with ES (except for providing unstable service...)?

They have a habit of copying open source software and re-branding it as their own.

Here is an article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/technology/amazon-aws-clo...

That’s not the same thing as using their customers’ data to compete against their customers.

Fair enough, I know the original article was about what you just mentioned. Still doesn't give them a pass to how they carry out their business though.

Yes, the technology behind zoom can be repicated in less than 2 years and for less than 100m.

Probably less than that. The reason it's so popular is that it's easy to install, requires no sign up...and you can record the meeting. Skype, Teams, Hangouts, Slack, etc all have difficult processes to join a meeting (or signup/signin/install programs to get to it.) I honestly think that is why Zoom has succeeded. Then of course there are the caps on meeting space, but I don't think that is the main reason for its success. Almost all boils down to the amount of friction to actually get into something. Microsoft, IMO is the one that really bungled this. They should be dominating the space. They should just roll out something called "Teams Meet" that is effectively Zoom, where people can join from Teams (you're signed in) or a small program that requires no signup/sign in. Doesn't take a genius to figure out the appeal.

We used Zoom over Meet for 2 reasons. One, it had a big board where you could see all or most participants at once. Two, you could have larger meetings for free or a low cost vs. Meet. Recording ease was a big motivator but not a final deal breaker. Since then, Hangouts has added a big board style view that I've yet to test fully. On our next company meeting I will try out Hangouts and see.

Microsoft is the most disappointing. Skype for Business is literally the worst product of this type ever. I’d rather use ICQ from 1997.

Teams is much better, but is the weirdest product ever. AFAIK, it consists of two voip products, bundled with a thickish client for SharePoint.

The marketing spend would cost way more than to catch up in mindshare though.

The brand name "Zoom" is easily worth $100M on it's own now.

Zoom feels like a pied piper-eskque app to me. Awkward and clunky to use, lag and issues are expected. Doesn't help that we've been given no guidance from higher ups on how to use the software, so we've been discovering features as we go. Today I finally learned how to let someone else share a screen, and that button was not where you would expect.

You don’t have to ‘let’ someone else share a screen with Zoom - any attendee in a regular meeting can do so. Unless your IT dept went out of their way to really screw up your default preferences, you might be thinking of another web meeting client.

Nah we have zoom premium accounts. Kinda. You have to register it in this strange way, so half of us don't have these accounts. What this means is that if you start a zoom meeting with the premium account, you are a host and everyone else with the organizational premium account is a cohost. If you haven't enabled premium on your zoom, or you are a collegue from outside the org, the host of the meeting has to open screen sharing privileges for all guests. That button is found next to the share screen button, a small carrot revealing a menu with advanced screen sharing options. Within that settings menu is the toggle to allow guest to share screens. This is in contrast to most other host/guest controls that are found in the participants pane. These aren't the default settings, but we had to adopt these due to zoom bombings throughout the org a few weeks ago.

Of course it's zoom I'm talking about, come on dude.

The same way a startup chooses any hosting platform. They pick who their VCs tell them to pick because it's all a slush fund. Zoom's losses are another business owned by the same VC's gain.

The last time I checked, Zoom was a publicly traded company. Of course, this doesn't invalidate your second point due to the existence of large institutional public investors.