Follow the Money: Cloud Credits, Venture Funding, and an IPO

It's another jam-packed week in the cloud database market. Oracle CTO Larry Ellison yesterday introduced a new program that gives customers credits on software license support fees when they commit to buy Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. "It's a big deal," said Ellison. "Almost all of our customers have potential for significant savings." 

There's also news from Neo4J, InterSystems, and Couchbase. The highlights: 

• Oracle's new Support Rewards program gives customers a rebate on licensing support fees when they commit to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) services. The reimbursements range from 25% for OCI Universal Credits to 33% for customers with Oracle Unlimited License Agreements (ULAs). Oracle says some customers may be able to eliminate their on-prem licensing support bills through the program.  

• Neo4j has received $325 million in its latest investment round, which the company describes as "the largest in database history" and puts the graph database company's valuation at more than $2 billion. "Databases constitute the single largest market in enterprise software," said Neo4j co-founder and CEO Emil Eifrem in a blog post. 

• InterSystems introduced the latest version of its IRIS data platform featuring Adaptive Analytics, developed in partnership with AtScale, a developer of data virtualization for analytics. The new capability uses data fabric technology to provide self-service analytics to end users. It's the latest piece in InterSystems "smart data fabrics" architecture. 

• Couchbase, which develops a NoSQL cloud database that competes with MongoDB and others, disclosed plans on to file an IPO.

One other thing — don't miss our podcast on data clouds from Snowflake and a growing chorus of other vendors: "Snowflake and the Data Cloud Phenomenon."