In an amazing turn around the man that topped this month’s rankings is the same man that in September 2008 completely dissed cloud computing while speaking at an analyst conference.

[quote_box_center]“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. … The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?”[/quote_box_center]

Yes, top of the individual rankings for June 2015 is none other than Larry Ellison, founder and CTO at Oracle. One day I am sure we will tire of reminding Larry of this quote, but not yet!

[easy-tweet tweet=”The #CloudInfluence #1 spot for June 2015 goes to @LarryEllison CTO @Oracle” user=”Comparethecloud”]

This month Larry was in full cloud evangelism mode for Oracle:

[quote_box_center]”We’re now prepared to call our application suite complete, which means that you can now move everything in your data centre to the Oracle cloud,” Ellison said, before adding. “We’re prepared to compete with Amazon.com on price.”[/quote_box_center]

He’s obviously now a complete cloud convert, joining the idiots and matching their gibberish.

Can Oracle be the firm to take on AWS? It certainly has the breadth and scale: it spans the full spectrum of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS). It can also control everything from the iron right up to the top of the software stack. Add to this its corporate clients list, and its willingness to take on complex hybrid environments that AWS has so far shied away from and it makes a formidable competitor. It also has a significant cash cow from its licencing and maintenance to fund its cloud expansion and a considerable lock-in with its database clients. Contrast this with the public cloud market share leader, as its recent financial disclosure showed, AWS may be profitable, but its parent company Amazon is hardly making any profit at all.

Pipped to top spot this month was Satya Nadella from Microsoft who managed to stay just ahead of Larry’s Oracle colleagues, Mark Hurd and Safra Catz who joined the Oracle cloud love-in.

Then came Mark Reuss, President of General Motors, talking about making the computer systems in firm’s new cars’ cloud-based. Before you get carried away and think that we’re talking about flying cars here, it’s just the automotive and telematic data from the cars that will be in the cloud. And control will remain with the driver for the foreseeable future – driverless cars still being some way off.

Drew Houston, Founder and CEO of Dropbox explained this month how after seeing years of user growth, the firm needs to expand beyond its consumer focus and attract more lucrative business clients. Ths is why he has appointed Dennis Woodside, an 11-year Google veteran who was most recently Motorola’s CEO, as DRopbox’s first-ever chief operating officer.

Then we have Daniel Ives from FBR Capital Markets, a regular in our rankings, commenting this month on VMware and Oracle among others. He was followed by Tim Cook explaining how Apple is expanding user privacy to prevent iOS apps from seeing other installed apps.

David Wadhwani, SVP and GM, ofDigital Media at Adobe revelled in the announcement of Creative Cloud 2015 which he described as Adobe’s most powerful and comprehensive release to date.

Rounding out the top ten this month was Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich commenting on a host of advances to Azure including SDN and containers as well as celebrating his firm’s inclusion as a leader in Gartner’s Public Cloud Storage Services for the second consecutive year – see our special report on cloud storage.

Other notable appearances in this months rankings includes:

Jim Reavis, executive director of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), rose to prominence arguing for the standardisation of security APIs to help the ecosystem coalesce around a universal language and process for integrating security tools into the cloud applications.

Mike Wynne, GIS Business Analyst for the City and County of San Francisco who was thrilled that his city had been selected as a 2014 City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge winner by AWS for its innovative use of … er … AWS.

And finally Iranian Brigadier General Gholamreza Jalali created attention commenting on Iran’s ban on the use of smartphones, arguing that these handsets are a perfect cocktail of security risks as they often back up their data to the cloud. The move may impact staffers, but the Iranian government will likely consider it a worthwhile sacrifice if it prevents other nations from spying on its political manoeuvres.

[table id=36 /]

NOTE: the Compare the Cloud #CloudInfluence league tables, are based on a broad big data analysis of all major global news, blogs, forums, and social media interaction over the past 90 days. The league tables provide a snapshot taken at a particular point of time of the respective influence of both organisations and individuals over the last quarter. Companies that were particularly active in the given period will feature more prominently.

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