Oracle gained new bragging rights in its ongoing cloud war against Amazon Web Services (AWS). The latest KuppingerCole Analysts report, Leadership Compass: Enterprise Databases in the Cloud, ranks Oracle Autonomous Database the "overall leader" in product and innovation. However, AWS maintains market leadership.

“Oracle has been continuously developing numerous innovative database capabilities for decades,” said KuppingerCole lead analyst and report author Alexei Balaganski.

KuppingerCole’s annual Leadership Compass report provides a detailed evaluation of eight enterprise databases for modern, cloud native application architectures as well as data processing and analytics at scale. An additional nine companies “for various reasons were unable to participate in the rating but are nevertheless worth mentioning,” it says.

The report focuses on vendors that offer comprehensive portfolios covering a broad range of use cases from single universal database engines to choice-based individual products.

The overall leadership rating is a combined view of the three leadership categories: product leadership, innovation leadership, and market leadership.

Balaganski noted some vendors that “benefit from a strong market presence may slightly drop in other areas such as innovation, while others show their strength, in the product leadership and innovation leadership, while having a relatively low market share or lacking a global presence.” 

Frankly, this is a nice way of saying money isn’t the only measure of market success. 

Oracle sits at the top of the overall leaderboard, followed by AWS, Microsoft, MongoDB, and IBM. Balaganski, in his analysis, notes it is interesting to observe how the two leaders “represent different approaches towards the design of their database service portfolios.”

Despite being a database vendor with decades of experience, Oracle is still an underclassman in a cloud market of seniors. Still, the report applauds Oracle’s single, multi-model converged database for its autonomous cloud services that hide complexity of management and maintenance. This makes an enterprise database accessible to even small businesses or individual developers. The report describes it as “the kind of innovation customers are looking for in a cloud database.” 

Amazon – the oldest and largest cloud service provider in terms of its infrastructure footprint – by contrast, does not offer a similar multi-modal database, the report states. Instead, it offers 15 specialized managed database services.

“Both of these strategies have their advantages and shortcomings, but at KuppingerCole, we believe that the unified approach offers more long-term benefits for customers, including significantly lower learning curve for developers, more flexibility in changing data models mid-development, and availability of all project data in one place without creating multiple data silos,” Balaganski wrote. “A major downside of the other, tool-focused approach is, of course, the increased difficulty of consistent data management and analytics across several incompatible database engines, which has to be compensated with additional tools or services.” 

Oracle Autonomous Database, which launched in 2018, uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to automate provisioning, management, tuning, and upgrade processes 

In addition to its “fully-autonomous, self-driving database” cloud offering, autonomous database services are available on-premises, thus “delivering a truly unified ‘hybrid-native’ platform for managing enterprise data at the cloud scale, while retaining the level of security and compliance previously available on-premises only,” the report said.

In September, the vendor made available Oracle Cloud Guard and Oracle Security Zones, which further drive the company’s strategy to make cloud security simple for customers and available at no additional cost. KuppingerCole complemented Oracle’s “security by design” approach that incorporates data protection and privacy controls into every layer of the company’s cloud infrastructure.

“This makes Oracle Cloud a compelling alternative to its more established competitors, especially for enterprises operating in highly regulated industries or having massive egress traffic requirements,” according to the report. In fact, the analyst firm expects Oracle Cloud to surpass all other major cloud services providers by 2021.

However, that growth could come to a screeching halt if Oracle’s database engine does not take new shape in a format that can accommodate highly distributed modern application architectures.

Sometimes, less is more. As for AWS’s, more quite literally means more. The cloud giant offers 15 fully managed database services to provide cloud infrastructure for just about any existing database.

AWS focuses on providing purpose-built database engines for different data models and diverse use cases. In some ways, however, its sheer strength in presence, connectivity, and selection is also its weakness. Basically, AWS is a great option for users that know exactly what they’re looking for and how to use it. 

While AWS does offer comprehensive database migration services, the report makes a point to call out how a fragmented database portfolio makes cross-silo data analytics more complicated. Additionally, a fragmented database portfolio further complicates management as capabilities vary between database engines.  

But Oracle shouldn’t sound the victory cannon just yet. This is, after all, just one of many battles in the company’s long-running and well-documented feud with Amazon. 

In fact, on the same day that KuppingerCole released its report, Oracle’s SVP Rich Geraffo announced in a LinkedIn post that is moving to AWS where he will serve as VP of Americas sales for AWS. “I start my new journey with @AWS, to be a builder and innovate the future of cloud computing,” Geraffo writes.” 

Call it ironic, sure, or perhaps even a calculated attack to bring both sales smarts and Oracle accounts over to AWS — only time can tell. 

Oracle has been trying for years to retrofit its image in the cloud infrastructure market to remain competitive against the likes of the cloud's biggest players: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.  

And it has quite a way to go. Oracle still remains a “niche player” in the market, according to Gartner, well behind the leaders. Oracle’s market share sits at around 2%, based on data from Gartner, Synergy Research Group and Canalys, and ranks no higher than sixth globally, while AWS, according to Synergy Research, holds 33% of the market share