287: The Cloud Pod Rebrands to The Cloud AI So We Can Get A 1B Valuation

Welcome to episode 287 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! 2025 is already shaping up to be another year of “unprecedented” times, but have no fear, Justin, Ryan, Jonathan, and Matthew are all in the house and (mostly) recovered from the holidays – and just in time to bring you all the latest new year news in the cloud world. 

Titles we almost went with this week:

• Everyone is investing in AI… but you could invest in the cloud pod
• Oracle Exadata X11M: Burn a big pile of money
• The cloud pod has better security than Microsoft – mk
• The new and improved Cloud Pod 4.0
• Cloud Nine… Figures (or $80 billion)
• $60 Billion and Counting: The Ai Arms Race
• Oracle Exadata X11M: For When You Absolutely, Positively, Have to Burn Money
• The Cloud Pod rebrands to The Cloud AI so we can get 11B in funding

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info. 

General News

2:42 Oracle’s rampant cloud growth wasn’t enough for Wall Street, and its stock slides after-hours 

• We missed talking about Oracle’s earnings call on December 9th, since we were in the middle of our re:Invent shows. Apparently, their rapid cloud growth was not sufficient to appease the Wall Street gods., but honestly – what is ever good enough for them?  
• They reported earnings of 1.47 a share, just shy of the 1.48 expected by the analysts. Revenue was up 9% from a year before, at $14.06B below the street’s target of $14.1 Billion.
• Income was up 26% from prior year, to 3.15B.  
• Revenue from cloud services and license support was up 12% to 10.8 billion. 
• Oracle CEO Safra Catz said growth in the AI segment was nothing short of extraordinary, with 336% growth in GPU unit consumption from the prior year. 
• Despite positive signs, Oracle guidance was soft and this also angered the Wall Street gods. 

04:09 Justin – “…now in January, their stock is, up a dollar 11 today, but, looking at the month, they haven’t really recovered from earnings quite yet. So we’ll see how they do as they continue through the year. But, yeah, I mean, tech in general is down. I mean, everything’s down. Everyone’s waiting for the election to, election, the, the soaring in and the new administration to come in as we’re past that.”

04:34 HashiCorp 2024 year in review

• 2024 was a busy year for Hashicorp, and they wrote up a blog post to point out the highlights.
  • IBM + Hashicorp signed an agreement to be acquired by Big Blue. With