Six-year Oracle veteran Clay Magouyrk is the new executive vice president in charge of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, based in Seattle, reporting to co-founder Larry Ellison, executive chairman and chief technology officer. (Photo by Marc Fiorito / Gamma Nine Photography, via Oracle.)

Oracle wasn’t the first big tech company to offer public cloud computing infrastructure, or the second, or the third. When Oracle Cloud Infrastructure launched in 2016, aiming to compete against the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, it practically redefined the concept of minimally viable product, or MVP — with just one cloud region and a handful of cloud services.

“We were definitely minimal,” recalls Oracle executive Clay Magouyrk. “I don’t think we were viable at the time, but we had an MP … and we just kept working.”

Magouyrk, who was there at the beginning, has been named the new executive vice president in charge of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, based in Seattle, leading a team of thousands globally. His predecessor, Don Johnson, has taken on a new role that points to the longtime database company’s broader ambitions in the cloud.

Four years after Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s launch, Magouyrk says, a lot has changed. Oracle announced its 25th cloud region last week, and says it plans to add eleven more by this time next year. The company turned heads when it announced fast-growing video conferencing company Zoom as a cloud customer in April. (It also drew the attention of Amazon Web Services, which was quick to note that it still serves the majority of Zoom’s public cloud workloads.)

In a recent report, analysts from research firm Gartner said companies should consider Oracle a “viable option” when evaluating public cloud providers.

Synergy Research Group data shows Amazon accounting for a third of worldwide cloud spending of $30 billion in the second quarter, with Oracle in single digits. (Synergy Research Group Chart)

The Redwood Shores, Calif., company is still a small player in the cloud, with single-digit market share, and it continues to play catch-up on a variety of fronts. That same Gartner report, for example, also cautioned that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has “a very limited ecosystem of third-party management software.”

But Oracle’s late start in cloud infrastructure came with an advantage that is now becoming more apparent, contends Magouyrk. Whereas Amazon Web Services was originally targeted to startups and small teams, before expanding to serve big corporate customers, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was conceived later, when the larger potential of the cloud was clear.

“When you know that’s where you’re going,” he said, “you build things differently.”

A recent example: the launch of “Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer,” which makes all of Oracle’s cloud services available as a fully managed cloud region in its customers’ data centers. Larry Ellison, Oracle executive chairman, CTO and co-founder, described the initiative as “a first in the cloud industry.”

While such proclamations from Ellison are common, even some of the company’s critics called the move surprising and unique.

Magouyrk, who joined Oracle six years ago from Amazon to help build and launch Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, led the team that developed Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer. Now the 33-year-old executive is taking on a bigger role as the executive in charge of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, reporting to Ellison.

Don Johnson, former executive vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, will remain at the company, focusing on cloud initiatives beyond OCI. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop)

Magouyrk succeeds Johnson, the original Oracle Cloud Infrastructure leader, whose recent initiatives have included a partnership with longtime Oracle rival Microsoft. Johnson said in a June 30 email to his team that he will remain at Oracle, reporting to Ellison and focusing on the company’s broader cloud mission.

“This has been the eventual plan for a long time,” Johnson wrote in the memo. “Clay was the first person I hired here at Oracle, we built OCI together and have been driving it in tandem from the start. As he’s stepped into a broadening leadership role, steering both technology and the business, it was clear that Clay is the right person to lead OCI into the future.”

In explaining his new role, Johnson signaled Oracle’s bigger ambitions.

“Oracle’s position in the cloud landscape, simplistically, is that we offer a marriage of the best cloud infrastructure, and leading data platform, together with the most pervasive cloud applications. No one else does this, or realistically, can do this as we can. The full realization of this vision is that Oracle provides the most complete cloud platform to build on and to operate your entire business – a business platform, an infrastructure platform, a data platform, a development platform.”

Johnson said Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has the potential to become “an enormous business, a ubiquitous platform that customers around the world will build on and use to operate their businesses.”

The company is a long way from that right now, with market share that pales in comparison to Amazon, Microsoft and Google, which together control 60% of the market, according to Synergy Research.

Gartner puts Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s market share at 3%, predicting that its market share could at least double by 2025.

But Oracle is falling short in a key measure of future growth, says Seattle-area angel investor Charles Fitzgerald, who watches the cloud industry closely and keeps a close eye on capital expenditures, or CapEx, that fund the build-out of the major cloud platforms. His calculations show a 20% decline in Oracle’s annual capital expenditures over the last two years.

Oracle’s annual cloud spending, courtesy Charles Fitzgerald, originally published in his post, Follow the CAPEX: Clown Watch

“CAPEX doesn’t lie,” said Fitzgerald via email this week. “Oracle’s CAPEX has been declining in absolute and relative terms since 2017. Whatever the marketing spin, they are falling further and further behind the real hyperscale clouds.”

In an interview, Magouyrk called capital expenditures “the wrong conversation to have.” Customers, he said, want to know that a provider has the regions and capacity to serve their needs.

“Zoom doesn’t care how much CapEx I spent, what Zoom cared about is that they were able to show up, and I was able to give them the capacity they needed in all the regions they needed,” Magouyrk said. “In my mind, if you’re asking me about CapEx, you’ve missed the point of the cloud. My job is to provide a service so that you don’t have to worry about how much CapEx is being spent.”

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is based in downtown Seattle, one of several large cloud engineering centers that have helped to give the region the nickname “Cloud City.” Google Cloud opened a new engineering outpost last year on the edge of the Amazon headquarters. Microsoft Azure is based across Lake Washington in Redmond.

Magouyrk (pronounced ma-gwork) was born in Japan while his dad was serving in the U.S. Air Force, and lived in states including Maryland and Alabama before ending up in Memphis for his high school and college years.

He started writing software when he was a kid, following in the footsteps of his dad, a software developer. He graduated from the University of Memphis with an electrical engineering degree and moved to Seattle in 2008 for a role at Amazon, staying there six years before going to Oracle.

“The thing I love about programming is that the barrier to entry is so very low,” Magouyrk said. “If you can afford a few-hundred-dollar computer, you now have the same level of tools as the most advanced people in the entire world. That’s not true for a lot of sciences. It’s not true for a lot of engineering.”

“The only thing holding you back,” he said, “is what’s in your brain and how much you’re willing to work.”

That principle also applies to his new role, he said, and to Oracle’s ambitions in the cloud.

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