Oracle’s inventory is lastly catching up with its discuss cloud, fueled by surging infrastructure and AI demand. In its latest This autumn 2025 earnings assertion, the 46-year-old database big shocked Wall Avenue with an 11% leap in income (to $15.9 billion) and bullish forecasts for the yr forward. Oracle’s inventory promptly loved its finest week since 2001, leaping 24%. It’s comparatively simple to please (and idiot) buyers, however there’s actual substance in that 11% leap, and that substance is, at its basis, all about knowledge.
That is new for Oracle. I and others have criticized the corporate for being too gradual to embrace cloud. Because of this, each Microsoft Azure and Amazon Net Companies pulled forward of Oracle in database income just a few years again as cloud turned central to enterprise technique.
Oracle, nevertheless, discovered a workaround.
For many years, Oracle Database has been the center of the enterprise. It’s the system of report for a lot of the world’s most important knowledge. As a substitute of competing head-on with the likes of OpenAI and Google on basis fashions, Oracle is providing one thing way more sensible to its enterprise clients: the flexibility to run AI securely on their very own knowledge, inside their very own cloud surroundings. The brand new Oracle Database 23ai is a testomony to this technique, integrating AI capabilities instantly into the database in order that firms can get insights from their knowledge with out having to ship it off to a third-party service.
It’s good, but it surely’s additionally not sufficient. Sustaining Oracle’s newfound momentum might require Oracle to achieve an space the place it has traditionally struggled: successful over builders. Builders, in spite of everything, are the folks constructing the purposes that can draw on all that Oracle knowledge.
Cloud-based AI favors database distributors
Giant language fashions (LLMs) have wowed us for the previous few years with all they might do with huge portions of publicly accessible knowledge (even when the unwitting knowledge suppliers, like Reddit, haven’t at all times been completely happy about that function). They’ve began to stumble, nevertheless, en path to true enterprise adoption, hampered by safety considerations and the truth that as knowledgeable as they’re by the web, they’re extremely dumb in terms of a given enterprise as a result of they’ve zero entry to that knowledge. Corporations have tried to get round this drawback with retrieval-augmented technology (RAG) and different ways, however the true bonanza is ready for the businesses that may assist enterprises apply AI to their knowledge with out having that knowledge go away their secured infrastructure, whether or not working on premises or within the cloud.
A number of distributors are figuring it out. Certainly, I’ve had a front-row seat to this phenomenon at MongoDB, the place firms are discovering it helpful to retailer and search vector embeddings alongside operational knowledge. Oracle is seemingly discovering one thing related, as famous on its earnings name, and is lastly spending huge on knowledge facilities to maintain up with rising demand ($21 billion this yr, which is greater than 10 occasions what it was simply 4 years in the past).
Unsurprisingly, Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison couldn’t resist a little bit of grandstanding on the earnings name, successfully arguing that in terms of enterprise AI, Oracle has a home-field benefit. “These different firms say they’ve all the info, to allow them to do AI rather well…. The one drawback with that assertion is that they don’t have all the info. We do. Now we have many of the world’s precious knowledge. The overwhelming majority of it’s in an Oracle database.” It’s traditional Ellison swagger, however there’s fact there: Oracle databases stay ubiquitous in giant enterprises, storing troves of business-critical knowledge.
Oracle is leveraging that place by making its database and cloud companies “AI-centric.” Oracle’s pitch is that enterprises can use the info already sitting of their Oracle apps and databases to realize AI-driven insights securely and reliably with out having emigrate every part to some new (and certain much less safe) AI platform. “We’re the important thing enabler for enterprises to make use of their very own knowledge and AI fashions,” Ellison argues. “Nobody else is doing that…. For this reason our database enterprise goes to develop dramatically.”
In Oracle’s view, the true gold rush in enterprise AI isn’t simply hyping up the most important common AI fashions, however serving to firms apply AI to their very own knowledge. Oracle has additionally been a bit much less Oracle-like by embracing multicloud. Quite than insisting all workloads run on Oracle’s cloud (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI), the corporate has inked partnerships to make Oracle Database accessible on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. For enterprises involved about knowledge sovereignty, latency, or simply avoiding single-vendor lock-in, that’s a gorgeous story.
Nevertheless it’s not but an entire story. For that, Oracle wants to determine builders.
The lacking piece
Eleven years in the past I known as out the lacking piece in Oracle’s cloud ambitions: “Oracle … has constructed a cloud for its current clients however not for builders who’re constructing huge knowledge, web of issues, cellular, and different fashionable purposes.” I doubled down on this theme, insisting that Oracle had didn’t treatment “an virtually full lack of curiosity from builders.”
Plus ça change…
Oracle’s cloud development to date has come largely from promoting to the CIO, not the developer, signing huge offers with firms that already belief Oracle for databases or apps, serving to clients migrate current Oracle-centric workloads, and so on. That’s a superbly legitimate technique (and a profitable one), but it surely leaves Oracle underexposed to the grassroots innovation occurring within the broader developer group. Why does developer enthusiasm matter if Oracle can preserve signing enterprise contracts? As a result of within the cloud period, builders are sometimes the new enterprise kingmakers driving know-how adoption.
Certain, the CIO of a big financial institution would possibly signal a top-down take care of Oracle for an ERP system or database licenses, but it surely’s the builders and knowledge scientists who’re dreaming up the following technology of purposes—those that don’t even exist but. They’ve a world of cloud choices at their fingertips. In the event that they aren’t considering of Oracle as a platform to create on, Oracle dangers lacking out on new workloads that aren’t already tied to its legacy footprint.
A modest proposal
It’s not my job to inform Oracle the right way to get its developer act collectively, however there are some apparent (if tough) issues it might and will do. Oracle doesn’t must turn into “cool” in a Silicon Valley startup sense, but it surely does must decrease limitations so {that a} curious engineer or a small group can readily select Oracle (together with MySQL) for his or her subsequent mission. For instance, years in the past Oracle ceded MySQL’s dominant open supply pole place to Postgres. It’s unclear whether or not the corporate would ever take into account an open governance mannequin for MySQL, however which may be the one strategy to put MySQL on equal footing. MySQL has nice engineering, but it surely wants group.
Much less culturally tough, Oracle must preserve bettering onboarding and pricing to make it simple for builders to choose its cloud. One factor that made AWS standard with builders was the flexibility to swipe a bank card and get going instantly, with clear usage-based pricing. Oracle has made progress right here. OCI has a free tier and simple pricing for a lot of companies, however it might go additional. For instance, providing beneficiant free credit for startups, particular person developer accounts, or open-source initiatives may additionally seed grassroots adoption.
Oracle must also take a cue from Microsoft and improve its presence in developer communities and conferences, spotlight success tales of “constructed on OCI” startups, and increase applications that interact builders instantly. Oracle has began shifting on this route. At its CloudWorld 2024 convention, Oracle unveiled Oracle Code Help (an AI-powered programming assistant for Java builders on OCI) and new options in its Oracle Kubernetes Engine to raised assist cloud-native apps and AI workloads. These are welcome additions. The bottom line is to get such instruments into builders’ fingers and iterate primarily based on suggestions, which may very well be completed by an emboldened developer advocacy group.
Lastly, Oracle ought to package deal its distinctive strengths in a method that enables builders to simply faucet into them. For example, Oracle’s experience in databases and knowledge administration may very well be provided as developer-friendly companies. The corporate’s new Oracle Database 23c has “AI” options (JSON relational duality, vector search, and so on.) that sound nice, however Oracle wants to make sure a developer can rapidly provision a growth occasion of this database, load some knowledge, and name an API or driver to begin constructing an AI-powered app. In brief, Oracle ought to make its cool tech simply accessible. If Oracle can provide builders a style of what its high-performance cloud and knowledge programs can do—with no months-long enterprise procurement cycle—some will inevitably be impressed and advocate utilizing Oracle for brand spanking new initiatives.
Oracle is reaching one thing uncommon: a real second act in tech, many years into its life. By leaning into what it does finest (databases, enterprise purposes, and now high-performance cloud infrastructure) Oracle has made itself a contender within the age of AI. The following check will probably be whether or not the corporate can broaden its affect past the normal enterprise IT outlets which have at all times been its stronghold. If Oracle can discover a strategy to interact builders on their very own phrases (with out diluting its enterprise savvy), it may unlock one other degree of development that makes in the present day’s resurgence look modest.
