Salesforce and Amazon are both planning on entirely eliminating Oracle software from crucial business systems and replacing it "with open-source database software alternatives," reports The Information. Oracle Founder and CTO Larry Ellison's colorful remarks about the companies in the past is said to have impacted the move. 
Amazon already transitioned two internal databases that take care of its e-commerce operation to open-source NoSQL, reports Bloomberg. Salesforce is developing an internal database — code-named "Sayonara" — for its customer management and marketing automation software. Salesforce plans to end its reliance on Oracle by 2023. 
Oracle's database is currently considered the top in the world, according to The Information, but its reputation is overshadowed by price. There are now cheaper alternatives for customers. 

A couple of weeks ago, I met with Stuart Williams and Seth Ulinski, analysts at TBR, who shared some of their latest digital marketing technology research with me. Many fascinating findings — including the stat that I shared at MarTech in Boston, that over 75% of enterprises now have an executive explicitly responsible for leading …

Amazon’s business-to-business marketplace now has more than one million business customers and 85,000 sellers since launching in April of 2015.

Amazon Business has expanded its customer base across healthcare, education, government and commercial organisations. Its customers include Con Edison of NY, Gwinnett County Public Schools, Intermountain Healthcare, Johns Hopkins University, King County, Mayo Clinic, Siemens in the USA, and Stanford University, among others.

Amazon search moves customers along the customer life cycle. Google has long dominated the discover stage of the the customer life cycle. But Amazon is playing an increasingly large role in how customers find products. 

Search marketers can apply most of their best practices in Google for Amazon search. Marketing efforts on Amazon should be put in the hands of your search marketing team because their skillsets will be easily transferable. 

Amazon will look to take over the advertising industry. There has been no shortage of media speculation on Amazon eyeing the ad industry as another segment of its business. Advertisers are not only able to promote their products in Amazon, but also advertise across the web.

While established players like Adobe, Salesforce, and Marketo are rarely mentioned in the same breath as tech’s “Frightful Five“—Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft—there is increasing evidence that tech’s giants are eyeing martech. And they’re bringing superior talent, vertical advantages, and astronomical budgets with them.

Look at it this way: the dynamic is already widespread on Google. Because of Google’s monopolistic control over the search engine space, SEO and martech tools are beholden to Google’s whims. Ultimately, Google controls the flow of data. If it wanted to cut off a company like Moz and build its own tool, it could. The push into martech has already begun. Amazon offers a marketing stack under the Alexa banner, while Amazon Web Services dominates cloud-computing. 

According to Brinker, there’s an even bigger disruptive force coming from tech giants: new client interfaces like Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Google Home, VR and AR, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Voice-enabled computing and other new client interface technologies could disrupt the entire customer journey. Rather than visit a homepage or a company Facebook page, potential customers could simply tell their Alexa devices to buy a product. Amazon becomes the only player in that experience, leaving martech vendors on the outside looking in. Eventually, marketers may have to use software provided by these major platforms just to survive.

At its annual re:Invent user conference in Las Vegas today, public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced Amazon Lightsail, a new way for developers to quickly and easily get access to low-cost virtual private servers (VPS).

They don’t need to worry about provisioning storage, security groups, or identity and access management (IAM) when they want to just get a box to run a simple application. They can just use Amazon Lightsail now.

The thing is, for years companies like Linode and BlueHost have offered cheap VPS options. The startup DigitalOcean has risen to popularity because it made the VPS hip and a simpler alternative to AWS. Now AWS is directly going after the DigitalOcean style of cloud infrastructure — starting at $5, the Lightsail VPS prices are certainly competitive.