What once looked like a three-horse race for dominance in the cloud computing world, led by Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC, is quickly evolving into a much fuller field.

The competition is being driven by the emergence of more traditional tech players seeking to abstract away infrastructure headaches through automation and tightly packaged solutions, with the added attraction of consumption-based pricing for a hybrid computing model.

That’s the basis for what companies such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., Dell Technologies Inc., Oracle Corp. and IBM Corp. are offering through software and infrastructure-as-a-service solutions. Enterprise cloud is becoming a consumer-like experience, and the lines are blurring. Spin it up, spin it down and pay only for what you need.

“Over the last 10 years, we’ve found ourselves defining whether an environment was public, private or hybrid,” Jo Peterson, vice president of cloud and security services at Clarify360 Inc., said in an interview with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during HPE’s recent GreenLake Day event. “The labels are disappearing. Cloud is infrastructure, and infrastructure is cloud. Customers are consuming cloud in the best way that works for their businesses.”

Consumption pricing has appeal

What this means for the companies involved is that the next year could see a significant battle for compute market share as price competition intensifies when major industries grow used to paying by the drink.

HPE introduced GreenLake as a cloudlike as-a-service infrastructure with a number of workload support options in 2017, leading Chief Executive Antonio Neri to declare that the firm’s portfolio would be completely as-a-service by 2022.

In 2019, Dell rolled out its pay-as-you-go infrastructure program and then doubled down last year with the introduction of Project Apex, an alignment of different product and portfolio offers through a consumption-based pricing model.

Perhaps the loudest statement behind the case for as-a-service, consumption-priced delivery of cloud and infrastructure management solutions came in October, when IBM announced an entirely new company based on this model.

The yet-to-be-named new IBM business would provide infrastructure and a full suite of management services that the company already offers through its Managed Private Cloud IaaS. These services are sold based on billing for what is actually consumed. IBM sees this new company embracing a $500 billion business, according to its own estimates.

The jockeying by these major technology solutions providers provides a subplot for the main story. While pricing matters, workload flexibility is where the real action plays out.

“Pricing starts the conversation, but often that’s not the most important part,” Ezra Gottheil, principal analyst at Technology Business Research Inc., said in an exclusive interview with SiliconANGLE. “It’s flexibility. What these vendors are saying is: ‘You get all of these goodies without going to the cloud.’”

Focus on end user

Oracle just raised the ante in this high-stakes infrastructure and consumption game with a string of updates for its Autonomous Data Warehouse offering. The latest releases offer faster, simpler data loads, autonomous machine learning models and quicker time to insights.

Oracle’s moves show a clear focus on end-user capabilities, reaching out to developers who hold a keen interest in abstracting away complexity when it comes to managing data models and conserving company resources for the projects that really matter.

“Oracle is trying to democratize the use of data warehouses,” said David Floyer, chief technology officer at SiliconANGLE’s sister market research firm Wikibon. “It is pushing out to the lines of business, and it’s simplifying things. Oracle’s approach means that all data movement happens internally. It’s Oracle that’s doing that work for you, and as you grow, that becomes very, very important [in terms of] cost-saving.”

Not to be ignored is that Dell, HPE, IBM and Oracle all have a significant installed base and robust channel partner networks to sell services. While the three major cloud providers are making their own as-a-service plays, competition from the major tech industry players will be hard to ignore.

“What customers want is solid, serious senior advice as to how they leverage what they already have in terms of their existing infrastructure,” Harry Zarek, president of Compugen Inc., said during an interview with theCUBE. “But they want to modernize and update it so it looks and feels a lot like the cloud.”

Customer and competitor

Then there is the ultimate disruptor: Snowflake Inc. Built on the public cloud, Snowflake automates its share of the data flow by abstracting complexity related to latencies, bandwidth and time to query while leveraging the stack to generate insights regardless of where the data resides.

Snowflake has managed in less than 10 years to upend the natural order of business competition. The company is not only one of the cloud providers’ major customers, it is one of the biggest competitors as well.

Snowflake’s largest cloud partner is AWS, accounting for a respectable portion of Amazon’s EC2 business. But AWS has its own enterprise data warehouse product, Redshift, which makes it a direct competitor. Snowflake also does business with Microsoft and Google, yet IT spending data from last year continues to show that Snowflake has greater momentum for data warehousing than all three of the big U.S. clouds.

“You have this weird dynamic because Snowflake doesn’t run on-premises; it only runs in the cloud,” Dave Vellante, co-founder and chief research officer at Wikibon and host of theCUBE, said in an analysis of Snowflake’s market. “The cloud players all want your data to go into their database, and they push hard on customers to use captive services. At the same time, they need ISVs like Snowflake to run in their clouds because it sells infrastructure services, expands customer optionality and evolves the ecosystem.”

With a global pandemic accelerating digital timetables for many businesses in 2020, the need for as-a-service infrastructure and a cost model tailored for an uncertain economy has appeal. The major cloud players suddenly find that the conversation has shifted and the competitive landscape now looks a bit different than it appeared one year ago.

“The pandemic has brought forward a need to accelerate our customers’ digital transformation, their modernization efforts and help them solve a bunch of new business problems,” said Keith White, senior vice president and general manager of HPE GreenLake, during a recent interview with theCUBE. “The world is hybrid, and the world is multicloud. So customers are expecting these solutions. It’s being able to do that with the full cloud experience, all in a pay-per-use, fully consumption-based scenario.”

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