Oracle took a bold approach at CloudWorld 2024, positioning itself as a partner rather than a rival to some of its longest-standing competitors in the cloud market.
Instead of taking potshots at other firms, the event’s keynotes were filled with announcements that pointed to Oracle’s collaborative spirit and showed the firm’s willingness to open up the cloud world.
CTO Larry Ellison heralded “the beginning of the multi-cloud era” and a world in which Oracle makes good on the promise of multi-cloud when it comes to providing as broad a cloud ecosystem for its customers and partners as possible. “Giving customers choices has always been, always been good for our business,” Ellison told AWS CEO Matt Garman live on stage.
Oracle also put another form of collaboration front and center, putting immense emphasis throughout the event on the work it does with its vast ecosystem of customers. This was foregrounded from the start of CloudWorld as a major talking point of the opening keynote.
Safra Catz, CEO at Oracle, took to the stage at The Venetian in Las Vegas to talk about how important customer success is to the firm, bringing on a whole host of different companies to share their experiences.
“You – our customers – are what brings this all together for us,” Catz said in front of the audience.
Ahead of the event, we looked at how Oracle’s trusted and reliable history in the cloud could position it well to capitalize on the generative AI boom. With the event over, this rings true. Indeed, though the firm certainly unveiled its fair share of AI-related news such as its improved AI agents, the core message was still about trust in Oracle as a partner.
The value of the “multi-cloud era”
“Before this was called CloudWorld, it was called Oracle OpenWorld,” Ellison said on stage, seeking to cast the audience's mind back to a pre-pandemic Oracle that had not yet gone all in on cloud as its conference theme.
The idea behind OpenWorld, Ellison explained, was to emphasize how customers could freely “choose computers, could choose operating systems, databases, applications, and mix and match those”.
“When we moved into the very exciting world of cloud that offered a lot of tremendous benefits, it seems like we lost one thing. We lost the idea that customers could buy technology from many different companies and those technologies work gracefully together,” Ellison went on. Now, though, the “clouds are becoming open” and Ellison sees a world in which customers can use different cloud providers together in a way that is seamless and effective for business operations.
This teed up Ellison to talk about one of the biggest announcements from the event, the firm’s partnership with AWS that looks to drive integration between the two big-name cloud providers. Oracle also expanded on its partnership with Google Cloud at the event and, taken alongside its wider theme of collaboration throughout the event, it’s clear that Oracle is selling partnership as key for the multi-cloud world.
There’s no sign that Oracle might rebrand its annual conference once again – but Ellison’s messaging, and that of the firm throughout the event, seems to be that ‘cloud’ and ‘open’ are becoming synonymous terms.
“We build our technology so that you, our customers, can run it anywhere you want,” Catz said, during her own keynote.
Hyper-focused on customer success
Catz’s approach to the keynotes was customer-heavy – the Oracle CEO made the firm’s commitment to its customers clear before moving on to bringing out a stream of satisfied businesses running on Oracle.
“No longer do we just provide technology: we are now your partner in making that technology come to life,” she said, drawing on the repeated message of partnership in the context of customers.
She championed the firm’s great leaps in technology and advancements in capabilities but was careful to reinforce the idea that it’s “not enough because there’s the other part - our partnership with you.”
“That’s what I’m going to be showcasing today on this stage,” Catz continued, completing the remainder of her keynote by doing just that. Over the course of the keynote, Catz brought out representatives from all manner of industries including the CEO of MGM Resorts International, the CIO of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the COO of Cloudflare, and the CEO of Entel. The list went on.
Oracle has no shortage of satisfied partners, all of whom were, predictably, excited to talk about how they have used Oracle’s cloud products to drive value or enhance business operations. But the value of this exercise was less about the testimonies of Oracle’s customers and everything to do with the unified, collaborative image it presents of the firm as it nears its fiftieth anniversary.
It helped to reaffirm Oracle’s message for CloudWorld, that its success is built on the success of its customers, so it’s only logical that customer partnership is at the heart of Oracle’s mission.
The parade of customers from across all sectors also acted as a showcase for Oracle’s trustworthiness when it comes to sensitive contracts in both the private and public sectors. This aligns with its boasts on sovereign cloud at CloudWorld, with Jae Evans, CIO at Oracle, having told ITPro that the firm is seeing significant interest in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) from nation states.
The firm’s financials – also announced at the event – show this to be a strategy that’s working. Oracle reported a revenue of $13.3 billion across Q1 2025, a bump of 7% in USD and 8% in constant currency, driven in no small part by a 21% surge in cloud service revenues.
As the cloud world is only set to become more complex as AI continues to shift the tech landscape, Oracle’s message of partnership could serve it well, helping to ensure the firm’s continued relevance if not dominance.
