Oracle Builds for AI While Channel Rivals Chase Share

Oracle is reshaping its enterprise strategy around AI, multicloud infrastructure, and deeper ties with hyperscale partners such as AWS.

But as the company pours billions into data centers, pushes agentic AI across its portfolio, and cuts jobs to support that transition, rivals see an opening to compete more aggressively for Oracle-adjacent workloads.

That opportunity is especially clear in the channel, where partners are increasingly influencing decisions around cloud flexibility, Java licensing, cost optimization, and modernization. 

While Oracle is positioning itself as a core platform for enterprise AI, competitors are using this moment to argue that customers can reduce complexity and expense without staying locked into Oracle’s stack.

Oracle ties its AI strategy to the database

Most companies currently treat AI like a separate engine that they have to feed with data. Oracle wants to flip that script. Instead of moving massive amounts of data to an AI model, which is slow, expensive, and risky, Oracle is embedding AI directly into the database.

At a recent stop on the Oracle AI World Tour in London, the company made it clear that “Oracle targets agentic AI with database-centric updates,” Channel Insider previously reported. 

This strategy aims to support “agentic workloads,” which are AI systems that don’t just chat, but actually take action across business systems.

To make this practical for everyday business, Oracle has rolled out a new wave of “Fusion Agentic Applications” across finance, supply chain, HR, and customer experience. These aren’t just fancy chatbots; they are specialized AI agents designed to handle routine work autonomously.

“With agentic applications that can reason, decide, and act against defined objectives, finance and supply chain teams can move from passive productivity to systems that proactively carry work forward, improve working capital, reduce costs and delays, and operate with greater confidence,” said Steve Miranda, executive VP of Applications Development at Oracle.

AWS expansion reflects Oracle’s multicloud shift

Perhaps the biggest shock to the system is Oracle’s newfound love for its competitors. Oracle stock recently surged, adding $100 billion to its market cap, largely due to a major partnership expansion with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Instead of fighting AWS for every cloud customer, Oracle is making it easier for customers to run Oracle databases directly on AWS infrastructure. According to TheStreet, Oracle’s multicloud database revenue exploded by 531% in its most recent quarter.

“Oracle continues to advance multicloud connectivity as part of its commitment to helping customers unlock flexibility, agility, and performance across clouds,” according to Nathan Thomas, senior VP of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

This strategy acknowledges a simple reality: most of the Fortune 500 already uses AWS, but they also rely on Oracle for their most critical data.

The human cost of the AI push

Building this future isn’t cheap. Oracle is preparing to lay off thousands of employees to balance the scales. The company is pouring billions into the physical infrastructure, the massive data centers, and GPU clusters, needed to power the AI revolution.

Oracle may raise between $45 billion and $50 billion through debt and equity to keep this expansion going. The layoffs are expected to affect multiple divisions as the company seeks to automate more of its internal operations. 

While Oracle’s cloud infrastructure revenue jumped 84% to $4.9 billion recently, the strain on the money jar is real. The company is essentially betting the house on being the primary provider of computing power for AI leaders like OpenAI and Meta.

Java rivals are using the channel to win share

While Oracle pivots, competitors are using this period of transition to snatch away market share, specifically in the Java ecosystem. 

Azul, a major player in the Java space, is reporting massive growth as companies look to escape Oracle’s complex licensing fees and audits.

Azul’s “PartnerConnect” program has been a major weapon here, with 50% of its business now flowing through channel partners. They are specifically targeting companies that want to modernize without the Oracle tax. In one case reported by Azul, the utility company Ausgrid “eliminated its Oracle Java audit exposure and reduced licensing costs by 80%” by switching to Azul.

This stands in contrast to Oracle’s more infrastructure-heavy approach. While Oracle builds out capacity and integrates vertically, competitors like Azul are expanding horizontally, using the channel to reach customers, reduce friction, and capture workloads tied to Java, cost optimization, and cloud efficiency.

Partners are becoming a bigger factor in Oracle competition

That dynamic makes Oracle’s transformation more than an internal reinvention story. It is also a competitive inflection point for the broader channel ecosystem.

Oracle is betting that enterprises will continue to trust its database, infrastructure, and applications as AI spending accelerates. But the same market shift is giving partners and competitors new openings to challenge Oracle on cost, licensing, deployment flexibility, and modernization strategy. 

For enterprises that want AI capabilities without deeper dependence on a single vendor, that message is gaining traction.

For channel partners, the long-term opportunity is not just that Oracle is building for the AI era. It is that Oracle’s transition is creating fresh opportunities for rivals to win influence, especially in Java, cloud migration, and optimization work, where customers are already reassessing long-term platform commitments.