By Nishant Arora
New Delhi– The Cloud landscape is changing very rapidly, with enterprises and the governments throwing more queries on data security as cybercriminals take refuge in Cloud environments — leaving tech giants in a scramble to find solutions that are highly-secure, automated, scalable, agile and can take corrective measures on their own and eliminate “human error”.
At age 75, Oracle CTO and Founder Larry Ellison is standing tall against his younger Cloud rivals, now set to monetise on autonomous operating environments in the Cloud that eliminate complexity and human error to deliver cost savings, security and availability for the customers.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andy Jassy is 51 years of age, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is 52, Google CEO Sundar Pichai is 47, Google Cloud head and ex-Oracle executive Thomas Kurian is 59 and IBM Boss Ginni Rometty is 62.
Diane Greene who founded VMware and served as the CEO of Google’s cloud businesses from 2015 until early 2019, is aged 64.
Ellison, who has led Oracle for over four decades, is not bothered if senior executives have left him or taken “leave of absence” owing to personal reasons. If you saw him on-stage at the recently-concluded Oracle “OpenWorld 2019” in San Francisco last month, you must have realised that the lion is still roaring as the global Cloud turf becomes more competitive.
“It’s very personal. I love my job. I love the people I work with. I have hobbies but nothing that excites me so much as being part of Oracle. I think I’ve stayed engaged because I don’t want to miss anything,” he told the audience during one of the Q&A sessions.
“I’m probably more excited today because the length of the lever to move the world is longer than it’s ever been,” he added.
Under his leadership, Oracle is ready with its unique autonomous database that eliminates human labour.
“By eliminating human error, you eliminate pilot error. We spend much more on people than we do on storage, on compute, or any of our physical assets. Resource sharing is on top of the savings of human labour,” Ellison said.
When you use the Oracle Autonomous Database, it configures itself.
“It’s not possible for customers to make configuration errors, because there are no pilots to make errors. The system configures itself”.
Ellison never finished college. Starting his career by building databases for the CIA, the “self-made” billionaire cofounded Oracle in 1977 to tap into the customer relationship management (CRM) databases.
Today, Oracle’s market cap is over $180 billion and at 5th position on Forbes’ billionaire list, Ellison has net worth of over $67 billion. Oracle reported fiscal first-quarter revenue of $9.2 billion for the period that ended on August 31.
“The Oracle Autonomous Database not only eliminates human errors, but it’s configured in such a way that the memory can fail and the system keeps running. A server fails and the system keeps running, you’re not even aware of it,” said the Oracle CTO.
At an age when people wish to spend more time with family and friends and aim to retire in the serenity, Ellison is taking concrete steps to keep Oracle stay ahead in the Cloud race.
“When we meet next year, we’ll have more regions than Amazon Web Services (AWS). It’s stunning, absolutely stunning. We expect to add more than 1,000 Autonomous Database customers this quarter alone, and it’s accelerating,” said Ellison.
Age, perhaps, is yet another number for him. (IANS)
