
Why Zoom Chose Oracle - ceohockey60
https://interconnected.blog/why-zoom-chose-oracle/
======
hyperpape
I thought Corey Quinn's take was very smart:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23013960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23013960).

According to him, the cost of bandwidth is probably the issue, and would make
Oracle a compelling choice even if Zoom didn't have negotiating leverage.

Nota bene: it gives me no joy to say good things about Oracle. I hope it will
not happen again.

~~~
deanCommie
Genuine question coming from a lack of understanding of building a many-to-
many video chatting app.

Wouldn't you want to send the data peer-to-peer between the users rather than
funneling everything through the Zoom server?

You'd get better latency, and you wouldn't have to pay for the network
streaming costs...

~~~
user5994461
Peer to peer has been dead for more than a decade. Computers are all behind
firewall/NAT, they can't connect to one another. Mobiles are behind whatever
is the mobile network nowadays, it's outbound only, nothing can connect in.

~~~
boredgamer2
> Peer to peer has been dead for more than a decade.

Source? Some apps like bittorrent have increased in the past decade, have they
not?

~~~
user5994461
I shall say peer to peer in the context of legit software like video
conference, not for downloading movies.

Peer to peer simply doesn't work since NAT. Skype used to be peer to peer but
they backpedaled a while ago because this and more reasons that simply made
p2p obsolete and broken.

It's too long to cover in one message. Would you be interested if I write a
blog post? How peer to peer architecture became obsolete and why no software
is using it.

~~~
buttersbrian
If I am understanding the premise:

In a scenario of 12 people video chatting around the world, I don't believe
you could guarantee consistent high-speed connections between the involved
parties.

~~~
aeternum
Making the connection is the hard part. The vast majority of computers and
mobile devices basically do not have a routable/public IP address.

Teredo tunneling was one of the coolest solutions to this problem, providing
both NAT-busting and IPv6 support but unfortunately it never gained
popularity.

------
fomine3
Oracle Cloud's outgoing transfer pricing ($0.0085/GB) is absolutely cheaper
than top competitors (like Amazon EC2 US $0.05/GB for over 150TB/month). Could
it be one of a reason?

~~~
stingraycharles
These are list prices, and absolutely nowhere near the price large consumers
pay. If you commit to a certain bandwidth per month for an extended period of
time, it’s not difficult to get 80%-90% discount.

(I worked at a video delivery startup a few years back and these were exactly
the type of discounts we would get)

~~~
graton
I can't help but think "so what" if they are list prices. That is how we
should compare them is by list prices. If AWS, GCP, and others don't want to
have their pricing appear to be exorbitant then they should adjust their list
prices.

Also what percentage of their total customers are not paying list price? Is it
more than 10%, 20%, 30%? I know that me as an individual I will be paying list
prices.

And the problem with not comparing list prices is that of course you can have
two or more companies getting discounts with the exact same bandwidth who will
be paying vastly different rates.

~~~
user5994461
Do not compare on list prices for large companies like that. Comparing on list
prices is a huge mistake from developers (and young folks new to running a
company), because developers hate sales and negotiating and talking to people.
Everything above some volume has to be negotiated with suppliers.

In a video company doing 1 000 000 TB of transfer per month, you gotta
negotiate with every provider for bandwidth, that's just the way it is.

Just like if you were working for a plane company, you wouldn't be buying fuel
from the station down the street.

------
ComodoHacker
>Based on Ellison’s video endorsement of Zoom, Oracle the company appears to
be using Zoom wall-to-wall, instead of dog-fooding any internal product under
development.

Such endorsement usually precedes acquisition.

~~~
dylan604
Would that make Zoom's Oracle fees go up or down?

~~~
stevehawk
it means soon you won't be able to use Zoom internally unless you have a 32
CPU license and PeopleSoft. /s

~~~
smnrchrds
Only audio will be available in the community license. If you click on the
video button, of course it will start the video, but since it is an enterprise
feature, you'll get an audit notice and an invoice for a bajillion dollars in
the mail. /s

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jklinger410
Considering that at least Google is a direct competitor, and Amazon is very
aggressive at stealing ideas from their partners, I think choosing an
alternative like Oracle makes sense simply from a business ecosystem and
competition perspective.

~~~
TheSoftwareGuy
>Google is a direct competitor

I think that people over estimate potential damages of being your competitors
customer. Google is not going anywhere, with or without this contract, and if
they want to make an investment in video conferencing, they already have more
than enough capital & resources to do that.

Staying away from GCP purely because it is under google would be a crazy
decision

~~~
davidwihl
As of April 29, Google Meet is now free, which is seemingly direct competition
to Zoom, especially with the emphasis on security.

[https://blog.google/products/meet/bringing-google-meet-to-
mo...](https://blog.google/products/meet/bringing-google-meet-to-more-people)

Opinion my own not Google's.

~~~
haneefmubarak
Google Meet is "free" for 60 minutes, which conveniently enough won't be
enforced until September.

That's just a shady deal, especially if they end up trying to retire Hangouts
chat and so normal users can no longer use free video / voice call services
that they've come to rely on having for like 10+ years now.

Don't get me wrong - I love Meet on my business accounts and along with all
the other Apps in G Suite, it is well worth paying for. But I also value the
fact that normal ass standard Google users have been able to have access to a
semi-decent video and voice conferencing platform for over a decade now. I
hope that doesn't change come September.

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projomni
Half garbage, half true. I think what the author forgot to say, which is
really important is, zoom tested their workload on various paas platforms, and
they liked oracle's price performance ratio. Also Oracle is so laser focused
on big new logos, like Zoom or Slack. The author is obviously an outsider.

------
bitcharmer
Going with Oracle however you want to paint it is not going to end well.

There are hundreds of cases to prove it.

------
dang
Recent, related:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23010868](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23010868)

------
kerng
They already are using AWS and Azure, it's not that they are moving away from
that.

------
afwaller
Zoom probably benefits heavily from access to the lobbyists and lawyers which
form oracle’s core product offering.

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koblas
The article misses the Amazon competitive problem. Quite a few retail
companies will not do business with companies that host on AWS infrastructure
(e.g. Walmart).

[https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40367626](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40367626)

~~~
exhilaration
EDIT: I misread the parent; it refers to retailers not using tools like Zoom
because they run on AWS.

Original comment:

You mean like this part of the article?

 _If you deliver a product on top of a third party cloud platform, that cloud
can see all the telemetry data. Such access becomes problematic when that same
cloud platform offers a competing product, which is why no big retailer would
ever run their e-commerce operation on AWS._

~~~
throw_away
The parent is referring to a second order issue. Your quote talks about how
competing companies don't want to use AWS for their own products because it
would reveal traffic numbers and telemetry and Amazon could potentially later
release a competing product. Parent is talking about how zoom's customers
won't want to use zoom because they don't trust their corporate communications
to be trunked over amazon.

~~~
exhilaration
I reread the comment and you are absolutely correct. I've added an edit.

------
user5994461
The title should say Oracle cloud, otherwise it reads as the Oracle database.

------
dade_
Wow, conspiracies everywhere. Oracle has switched their provider from Cisco
WebEx to Zoom and the transition seems to have been very smooth. I don’t hear
their employees complaining about it, they seem to like it.

I think it is just reciprocal business. It isn’t as though zoom will switch
Google, Amazon or Microsoft.

------
jariel
"The deeper strategic consideration, I think, is Zoom’s concern with AWS and
Azure accessing its telemetry. "

This is really messed up.

If there is a 'real risk' AWS is reading your data on S3 ... then how on earth
does their business survive?

80% of businesses are dealing with sensitive data.

------
unnouinceput
Quote: "...more business with the U.S. government is the best “disinfectant”
to the FUD around its connection with China."

This cracked me up so hard that I've woken my wife and kids (it's ~3AM for
me).

------
rbanffy
I think it's a shame Oracle doesn't offer SPARC instances in their cloud.

Are they still competitive in performance against POWER9?

~~~
haneefmubarak
From Wikipedia:

> As of September 2017, the latest commercial high-end SPARC processors are
> Fujitsu's SPARC64 XII (introduced in 2017 for its SPARC M12 server) and
> Oracle's SPARC M8 introduced in September 2017 for its high-end servers.

>

> On Friday, September 1, 2017, after a round of layoffs that started in
> Oracle Labs in November 2016, Oracle terminated SPARC design after the
> completion of the M8. Much of the processor core development group in
> Austin, Texas, was dismissed, as were the teams in Santa Clara, California,
> and Burlington, Massachusetts. SPARC development continues with Fujitsu
> returning to the role of leading provider of SPARC servers, with a new CPU
> due in the 2020 time frame.

I don't think SPARC machines have been competitive in terms of (price /
performance) or even just raw (performance / development time) in a long,
long, long time. I imagine most of the market for SPARC machines are legacy
customers who are continuing to build and maintain older codebases that have
been running for a long time.

\---

POWER9 machines are pretty neat, but IIRC they compete _somewhat_ with
contemporary Xeons, which is to say that the difficulty / cost of obtaining
said POWER9 system and developing optimized software for it is going to be a
good bit higher, because IBM hasn't opened up that ecosystem enough and still
prices those machines at remarkably high prices (so there's not a meaningful
incentive for anyone to try bridging over to it as a new platform, with the
exception of hyperscalers like Google who use it as a constant threat to
negotiate prices with the like of Intel etc).

~~~
rbanffy
In the case of POWER, the scenario where they are clear winners is the scale
up one. This is a scenario you usually don't want to be in.

------
nolaspring
Reads like oracle needed discounted licenses in exchange for a presser about
adding some infrastructure to oracles cloud

------
arbitrage
Looking forward to the update from Zoom in about 18 months -- "Why we switched
from Oracle"

------
verdverm
This explains so much...

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lasky
it’s all downhill from here.

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contemporary343
Partly because Ellison is a big-time Trump supporter, maybe? A path to
avoiding both legitimate and illegitimate/scape-goating inquiries from the
administration.

------
contemporary343
Partly because Ellison is a big-time Trump supporter, maybe? A path to
avoiding both legitimate and illegitimate/scape-goating federal inquiries

