First thing I thought when reading the headline was &#x27;so is Oracle&#x27;. Glad it&#x27;s mentioned in the article.<p>AWS is absolutely killing it. Every release cycle, they put out quality products that directly attack Oracle. And, Oracle is in the bad position of having to eat their existing profitable business lines to compete.<p>Now, of course, cloud isn&#x27;t here yet. There are certainly lots of issues around security, auditing, privacy, data ownership, etc. But, the trend is accelerating. Why? Because the cloud is so much cheaper.  Why maintain and manage your own data center and infrastructure for millions of dollars when you can reliably outsource for a fraction?<p>I used to do a lot of work in the utility industry. I remember years ago giving a presentation on the cloud. The audience was passionate that it&#x27;d never, ever happen to them. They were extremely protective of their data. But, then I slowly saw it happening anyway. It crept in slowly. The first to go were the lowest risk systems. Then, the next lowest risk systems. Then, the next.<p>The incumbents will hold position for a long time to come, propped up mainly by government spending, hellishly long sales cycles, a corporate aversion to micro products, and FUD. They have plenty of time to catch up. But will they? That&#x27;s the question. Unless oracle is actively researching new cloud platforms (and I&#x27;m guessing they are), they&#x27;re going to be in pain in 5 years.  Corporations that don&#x27;t move to the cloud will be in a cost disadvantage.<p>On the other hand, serious work needs to be done to overcome the severe limitations of the current cloud. Lots of certification and auditing and risk assessments and SLAs need to happen.