Amazon Named Its Database Redshift For A Reason

Guess what? Amazon Web Services, it seems, very deliberately chose the name Redshift for its database in order to take a swipe at Oracle. And reportedly, so did Salesforce, with codename Sayonara.

One of the biggest surprises that 2018 had in store for us right at the very start of the year was the news that both AWS and Salesforce were moving away from Oracle database, in favor of their own open source solutions.

This, and that little processor glitch that has been wreaking havoc.

Anyway, it is no big secret that Oracle is the loudest of the legacy enterprise technology vendors when it comes to attacking the new guard over the past few years. And this is something that has not gone unnoticed by Amazon Web Services.

Or, Salesforce, for that matter.

The animosity between the two cloud pioneers and Oracle has got to do a lot with the brash style and history of notorious sales tactics of the latter company.

Oracle playing hardball essentially lit a fire between the database teams at both companies, with AWS naming RedShift to signify a move away from Oracle and its bright red logo, and Salesforce wanted to make a statement by codenaming its product, Sayonara.

Which is Japanese for goodbye.

All said and done, Oracle investors are now worried about losing two cash cows at once, and the company’s stock was down almost two percent after this news was made public.

Unsurprising, considering that AWS and Oracle basically spent 2017 exchanging pot shots at each other over database performance, cost, and reliability.

The only solace for Oracle here is that databases are just really hard to move to the cloud, compared to other types of software. This has given it time to shift its own users to its cloud. But if AWS executives are to be believed, they are seeing a lot of incoming business from Oracle customer now.

Customers that are looking for a new path.