Punchline? Oracle isn’t the biggest cloud provider but it’s naive to say they are a punchline. Oracle Cloud may not be used much amongst the startups or app/web dev crowd here on HN, but other parts of large enterprises are indeed eating up Oracle Cloud just as they ate up Oracle on-prem apps in past years.
So I spent time in the also-ran cloud space, ejecting from it as soon as I was able. What you characterize as "eating up", the places I've been have understood this to be "receiving desperate discounts to consider". Oracle and IBM are do-nothings. They're competing for a market segment predominantly with Azure (not AWS or Google), doing so really poorly, and have no compelling value prop.
From what I see at my consulting clients, the main areas where Oracle competes aren’t with Azure. The Oracle Cloud isn’t about spinning up VMs or web servers (though yes they do have those features), but about running enterprise apps where Oracle is still, much to the disappointment of many, the market leader. Some examples of this would be Oracle Identity Manager (which is absolutely awful but is still actually the only IdM solution really capable of scaling with massive enterprise companies) and of course ERP. Oracle ERP Cloud alone is a several billion dollar revenue source for them and is growing extremely rapidly.
> Some examples of this would be Oracle Identity Manager (which is absolutely awful but is still actually the only IdM solution really capable of scaling with massive enterprise companies)
The "massive enterprise company" I work for doesn't use Oracle IdM ...
It was used at the previous company I worked for, but it had endless problems and I think it was only bought as part of a very badly-run "buy an expensive 'enterprise content management platform and then not use it properly' initiative".
It's main feature seemed to be to import identities from LDAP servers into an Oracle database fronted by a very poorly performing non-compliant LDAP server (or, you could say, selling Oracle Database licenses).
How large is your company, in terms of number of people? I’m talking about companies with hundreds of thousands of managed identities/employees. OIM is typically the only IdM software capable of scaling that high (though it doesn’t come without its issues).
OIM certainly has much more features, and just by the virtue of being the largest/supported by the largest tech company, tends to have the most features and integrations of any IdM solution, which is another reason it’s favored by large companies that actually need that scale. Other companies with smaller numbers of people or less need for edge-case integrations typically go with something more user-friendly like SailPoint (and others are still stuck on IdM solutions of yesteryear like some of MS’s old offerings).
I can't imagine any greenfield project using Oracle technology today unless they are already an Oracle shop and at that point it's not really greenfield, is it?
So I brought up OIM because I have some personal experience with it and similar software. It’s main selling point is that it is extremely performing and scalabale, and it is so big (and supported by such a large company) that it has ready-made integrations with most other enterprise apps (and can be extremely flexible if you have a custom apps). These are pretty attractive qualities to giant, global companies with hundreds of thousands of employees and hundreds/thousands of apps to manage.
Competitors like SailPoint are typically more user friendly, easier to implement (as long as your implementation only integrates with common apps and doesn’t require deep customization) and comes from a generally friendlier software company, but it isn’t able to keep up performance/stability wise once you start moving above 100k-ish managed users.
The performance landscape is changing slightly now that other IdM providers are taking advantage of clouds as well for better scaling, but it’s taking some time for them to rearchitect applications to fully do so.
