A report published by KuppingerCole Analysts AG, Leadership Compass: Enterprise Databases in the Cloud, ranks Oracle Autonomous Database as the overall leader versus Amazon and Microsoft with leadership positions in cloud database products and technology, and cloud database innovation. In ranking Oracle as the overall leader, analysts at KuppingerCole rate Oracle’s cloud database offerings with a “strong positive” in security, functionality, deployment, interoperability, and usability.

“Oracle has been continuously developing numerous innovative database capabilities for decades,” notes lead author Alexei Balaganski, giving one of the reasons for Autonomous Database’s ranking as “overall leader” in enterprise cloud database.

Decades of innovation by Oracle product management and development teams—a process of day-in and day-out work on their customers’ most challenging use cases—has enabled Oracle to bring deep capabilities into the cloud and automate them on its second-generation cloud infrastructure.

KuppingerCole’s annual Leadership Compass report provides an overview of enterprise databases for modern, cloud native application architectures as well as data processing and analytics at scale.

The advantage of Oracle’s single multimodel converged database

Citing the increased volumes and complexity of information that ends up being stored in the cloud, the report lauds Oracle’s unique ability to keep it simple for cloud customers:

“With over 40 years of expertise, the company is arguably the leading solution provider for enterprise transaction processing, data warehousing, and mixed database workloads. The core technology that provides the common foundation for Oracle’s entire database services portfolio is Oracle Database, a multimodel database management system that combines a traditional relational database with NoSQL data models like JSON, key-value, and even HDFS file formats.

The report describes how Oracle has all its capabilities available in a single, multimodel database, running on highly optimized hardware, “powered by intelligent automation eliminating the human factor from database management—this is the kind of innovation customers are looking for in a cloud database.”  By contrast, Amazon offers no similar multimodel database.  In its analysis of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the report states, “… currently, AWS has a portfolio of 15 specialized fully managed database services.”

Product Leaders are based on “the functional strength of the vendors’ solutions,” says the report.

KuppingerCole believes the multimodel 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. 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.”

Complementing all of this, according to the report, is Oracle’s “security by design” approach, which brings data protection and privacy controls into every layer of the company’s cloud infrastructure. Combined with “highly competitive cloud service pricing, 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,” the report says.

Cloud innovation: Oracle Autonomous Database

Citing Oracle’s decades-long pursuit of database innovation, the report singles out Oracle’s autonomous database, which, eliminates human labor and human error with automated provisioning, upgrades, backup, and disaster recovery with no downtime.

Introduced in 2018, Oracle Autonomous Database uses machine learning and automation to perform DBA tasks without human intervention, “not just substantially increasing security and compliance of sensitive data stored in Oracle databases, but also noticeably reducing operational costs in the cloud,” notes the report.

Oracle offers, “the kind of innovation customers are looking for in a cloud database,” says the report.

“Since 2020, Autonomous Database services are available on-premises as well (or even as a part of Oracle Dedicated Region with over 50 managed services), 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 offers this outlook for Oracle’s future as a cloud service provider (CSP):

“…Oracle Cloud is currently growing at an impressive rate, planning to surpass all other major CSPs by 2021. Co-managed and autonomous database services are a major part of the company’s cloud strategy, making Oracle Database available in a public cloud or in a Cloud@Customer private cloud format, either on commodity hardware or on highly optimized Exadata infrastructure.”