Report: after years of trying, Amazon and Salesforce have made “significant progress” in move away from Oracle tech by building their own and using open-source
Context & Ripple Effects
This CNBC report is the opening signal of what became one of the most closely watched vendor divorces in enterprise tech. Within months, sources detailed Amazon's plan to completely move its infrastructure off Oracle's proprietary database by early 2020, and Amazon later quantified the shift, saying its own services would run 97% of its mission-critical databases.
The second front is Salesforce, which paired its retreat from Oracle with a deepening embrace of AWS — first through an extended partnership with new integration capabilities, then by selling most of its big apps on AWS' marketplace. Oracle's countermove came via a partnership with Microsoft linking their US data centers, explicitly framed as uniting against AWS.
First-order effects
- Amazon and Salesforce cut their Oracle licensing and support spend by substituting in-house builds and open-source databases for Oracle's proprietary stack.
- Oracle loses its two most prominent cloud-era reference customers, weakening the proof point it sells to enterprises weighing its database and cloud offerings.
Second-order effects
- Oracle responds by allying with Microsoft — linking US data centers to jointly compete against AWS — rather than trying to win the defectors back alone.
- Amazon converts its migration work into product: with VMware it ships database management software aimed at companies still running on-premises databases from Oracle, Microsoft, MariaDB, and others, turning an internal cost-saving project into external revenue.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to hyperscale cloud providers internalizing infrastructure software — replacing database vendors as suppliers while competing with them for enterprise workloads, a structural squeeze on standalone database economics.
- If the largest buyers keep self-building on open source, proprietary database vendors face pressure to partner for distribution (as Oracle did with Microsoft) rather than rely on lock-in at the biggest accounts.
The trend: The biggest cloud operators are systematically replacing proprietary database vendors with in-house and open-source systems, converting former supplier spend into their own platform advantage.