Oracle and Cloudflare: Building a stronger foundation for enterprise innovation

I'm Todd Tornga. I work at Oracle. I'm in our Alliances and Channels organization, and I'm part of a team that manages strategic partnerships. Cloudflare is obviously one of those to Oracle. We see huge opportunity with the two companies combined. David, do you want to introduce yourself? I'm David Bredbenner, and I am a principal partner manager at Cloudflare looking after the OCI partnership. We want to ask you guys a few questions to get this kicked off, right? This is pretty casual. I don't know if you guys want to move in a little bit. It's up to you, but we're curious, right? So Todd and I have been doing this for a short period of time, let's say like three months, right, since we kicked off this partnership, and it's been dynamic in an awful lot of ways. What would you guys think this partnership would be about? When you think about Oracle and you think about Cloudflare, obviously I don't know where you guys come from, if you're customers, or what your roles are, but what would you think this partnership would be about? I'm just curious, just from outside perception. Anyone? We have prizes, too. Really good prizes. Who said that? Cloudflare would be a part of Oracle's offering for their OCI portfolio. Okay, so you're partially right. Sorry, can you repeat that? Excellent. I would say that it's probably something more around the edge processing where Oracle is in the partnership there to associate that. Yeah, you're spot-on. Yeah, that's great. And the next question would really be just contemplating what you guys see out in the wild. There's a million CSPs out there and lots of other things that you can buy. Would you think this partnership makes sense? When you look at Oracle and you look at Cloudflare, based on where you guys come from, do you think it makes sense? Does it seem like something that has good synergy to you or do you think it's crazy? I actually think it's pretty good. I look at it from the context of processing on the edge and doing my thing. Yeah, I go back a long ways and I think about like the client-server side world where we did certain things on the client and then we send it to the server and I think that you're probably broaching some of that with the processing that you can do within Cloudflare and then taking it central into Oracle. I'm kind of interested how you guys are interacting with the Oracle Cloud applications as well. That's part of what I'd like to understand. We'll get to that. That's fantastic. You're spot-on in every way and he's not a plant. I just want to be clear. That's good. We love that. That's a fantastic thing. I think one of the things that, at least from Cloudflare, this is a Cloudflare event and a lot of Cloudflare folks don't know much about OCI. With that, I want to let Todd kind of give some background about why OCI, the partnership is super compelling and we'll get to that, but why is OCI compelling from a cloud perspective? Just quick show of hands, are people OCI users here? Are we familiar with OCI? You don't count. So OCI is Oracle's cloud infrastructure. It stands for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. It's what makes us basically a hyperscaler. It's our version of Amazon, GCP, and Azure and it's something we built maybe over the last 10 -15 years as we looked to take our applications and database, etc., into the cloud and offer them as a service. We decided to build our own infrastructure, not just for us. We wanted to also do it for our enterprise customers who wanted to run other workloads. So we hired a bunch of engineers in Seattle who had spent time building clouds for other people, running clouds for other people, and gave them money and said, go off and build a new cloud. Build one based on what you know of the past that worked and, more importantly, what didn't work that you would do differently going forward. And so that's what they did and that's what's OCI, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. It is different in many ways. It's very efficient in the way it runs. It tends to cost less than the competition. And over time, you know, AI has become more and more important for OCI, but in Oracle in general. So we've embedded AI in all that we do. We have a great platform for running AI applications, language models, everything, partnerships with NVIDIA, etc. So that's kind of a basic foundation of what OCI is. Yeah, it's, I mean, OCI is different than any other cloud that's out there, right? In the past, I worked with AWS for many years, and what we're seeing just, you know, sort of commercially, is customers are super intrigued and excited about it because of Oracle's approach to the cloud. It's much different. A lot of customers are felt locked in by AWS and Azure and GCP. So we're offering a really compelling commercial construct that gives them an alternative to that, right? The partnership is really straightforward. It's really a business partnership at this point right now. Well, having said that, I'll back that up a little bit. There's a big partnership between Oracle and Cloudflare that goes back many, many years. We're one of Oracle's largest storage purchasers, right? And Oracle buys a lot of Cloudflare stuff for use internally. But this partnership that Todd and I work on is really about getting out to customers and giving them that alternative. So as you rightly pointed out, Oracle has the back-end, the compute, the storage. They do that really better than just about anybody else. From a sovereignty perspective, commercially and anywhere in the globe, Oracle is reaching well beyond what, you know, AWS and some of the others are doing just from providing that cloud presence out there. Cloudflare does that same thing. We do the edge, right? So we have everything right here. Cloudflare sits at the edge. We provide the CDN, the WAF, the DDoS, and a host of other things, right? Cloudflare's big in cybersecurity. We've got Zero Trust. We have the development platform. We have all those things. And customers can buy that one of two ways, right? I don't know if you want to talk about the bundles at all, Todd, the integration. Yeah, so we have basically a continuum of offerings. There's four set bundles that we have available in the OCI console. So the same place you go to deploy storage, compute, whatever OCI service you want, you'll find four bundles of Cloudflare products. And they are set bundles. You click a few boxes and now you have access to those services. They are, like I said, set. If you find that they don't meet your needs, we also have an ability to do private offers through our OCI marketplace. And what those are is custom deals at custom prices with exactly what you need from Cloudflare. So our sales reps, their sales reps will work together, help the customer get exactly what they need. Benefit in both cases of these, or one of the benefits, is that you're allowed, we enable you to use Oracle Universal Cloud Credits to pay for the Cloudflare services. So it's not a new transaction. You're using the Cloud Credits that you've already purchased from Oracle. So if you don't know, the way Oracle works is you buy from us a set of credits that you can use for any of our services in any of our data centers. You don't have to tell us upfront exactly what you're going to run. You just buy the credits that you need. So we're allowing you to now also allocate those towards purchasing the Cloudflare products. Yeah, and there's some other commercial constructs that are key too. So about, I guess about seven years ago, we came together on something called the Bandwidth Alliance. So we have 17 peering locations with Oracle across the globe. In each of those locations, Oracle charges no egress fees from object storage out to Cloudflare. So when I think AWS increased theirs this year, this is a pretty significant cost savings to customers because egress is a big thing, right? I mean, they're pushing data out and we're seeing the growth in that space, you know, all over the place. And it really doesn't matter what segment we're looking at. Since we launched this, I mean, Todd and I have talked to people between Cloudflare reps and Oracle reps. The enthusiasm out there is really off the charts. I mean, we're on with anybody and everybody across the globe, right? Once customers are finding out about this, because a lot of customers know individually about Cloudflare. A lot of customers know individually about OCI, but putting those together is something that's new to them. And the more we get the information out there, the more people get excited about it. And there's more to come, right? We're working on new features and functionality with the partnership to make it easier to consume and to give customers more options. Because this is really about meeting the customer's needs on both sides of the cloud, really. So that's really what it's about. I don't know if there's really anything else that's super compelling to talk about it other than, you know, if you're working with an Oracle rep or a Cloudflare rep and you're a customer or you're working with customers, you know, find out from them how you get in touch. Todd and I will probably be on the front end of that, connecting you to answer those questions. We're going to be doing more and more of these kind of events. We're going to be doing more and more of these kind of events. But it's probably one of the most unique partnerships I've ever seen where we really come together to serve the customer in a way that I haven't seen in the past. Right? And I've got a few miles on me, so I've seen this before. I think with that, if there's anything else... I just want to say, I think one of the benefits for Oracle is we didn't have these advanced security and networking technologies available to our customers, sort of to your point. Now we do through this partnership. We have some basic services and they're great, but now we have industry-leading services that our customers can access with their cloud credits. For Cloudflare... Go ahead. Yeah, it's exactly the same. I mean, when Cloudflare goes to compete against Front Door or CloudFront, we didn't have a cloud. Now we do. So the synergy is really good. And the thing is not to forget those same elements that you talked about with AWS, that ease of procurement, all those things in one place. It gives customers a really easy way to consume this and manage it, manage their product set, and then manage the two product sets. So it's just super compelling because in a world where there's so many options out there, Cloudflare has a very nice portfolio where you can manage it all under one thing. And that combined with what you've got with Oracle, it really is easing the pain from a management perspective for customers with world-class products and services. And thank you guys all for coming. Appreciate it. Thank you. Appreciate it.