Chuck, thanks for the wishes, i hope Oracle succeed as well, we are far more likely to partner with you than with AWS :) already integrate with Oracle and most of our customers are T1 Enterprises, IoT, and SaaS. yes, technology is available to everyone, but not everyone knows how to make the most out of it or execute at the same pace. my point is that Block/POSIX abstractions are not optimal for scale-out data services (especially in the age of NVMe & NVM), Oracle actually pioneered that notion w Exadata Smart-scan & column compression. we just took that concept 2 steps further. can also see most new data platforms, not just cloud/hadoop (also Vertica, Splunk, ..) use DAS, this means trouble for NAS/SAN. happy to give you a deeper dive/demo on how we process 2M records/sec/node, cut analytic queries from hours to seconds, or process events from billions of sensors and visualize in real-time. only way to do it is avoiding the traditional serialized memory and storage stack (a.k.a ZFS). not confused about Enterprise IT, we spend much of our energy in delivering the industry most secure data platform, data governance, and ways to seamlessly integrate with both traditional DBs/Filers as well as Hadoop, Spark, Cloud and emerging IoT patterns. but what makes the most impact on our customers and why some call us "magic" is how we solve very hard business challenges. learned the hard way that its hard to sell to IT, IT is process oriented and move slow, you need to solve biz problems and the Biz unit will push IT. its another challenge the shrinking storage camp have, they can hardly make a difference at the App/Biz layer to justify decent margins. i hope you wont dismiss my feedback too easily, i like to see you succeed, I have many Oracle friends, but it may require you to adopt some fresh approaches thanks again, yaron

Chuck, the $13B (and rapidly growing) AWS revenue is not from legacy workloads, its people that understand legacy Apps don't help them with the Digital transformation or the existential threats and they consume services/APIs to move faster vs run IT shops or VMs/vDisks. yes, you are right about Enterprise IT having many legacy apps that wont transform easily but this $ is shrinking, some are just going to be ditched on the road in favor of Office365, SalesForce and the so many mobile first modern apps. if you are betting Oracle growth on Legacy Apps u wont be in a different shape than those storage companies, and AWS will pick the data in 100PB trucks. believe me i know Oracle, AWS, GCP & Azure (& EMC) tech inside/out, helped to build it in my previous jobs, there is nothing similar. building S3 or some NoSQL doesn't come close to the amount of modern services and tight integration that AWS offers. i can go into details offline why Exadata/RDS is nice but not going to take you far in terms of scale or TP/s. i work with many enterprises, haven't seen them considering Oracle seriously for cloud beside existing workloads or some that break under the huge pressure of Oracle sales, they need a cloud vendor that innovates and takes them through the digital transformation, not one that focus on the legacy, or one that is known for unfriendly licencing. you may want to check my 1yr old post, they have progressed quite a bit since: https://sdsblog.com/cloud-data-services/ Yaron

Chuck, While i 100% agree w your observations re the on prem storage market, cloud providers like AWS, GCP and Azure also have quite a different stack than on prem or Oracle with scale-out built-in to the Application/databases coupled with DAS You praise Oracle ZFS when in fact it serves legacy workloads, to compete Oracle need to redesign for scale-out and cloud-native (12 factor) as well, or it won't manage to become relevant in the cloud wars, i suggest you look up the Architecture of AWS SQL DB Aurora or Google Spanner Yaron