There is a smooth curve between cloud and dedicated DCs, which has various levels of managed servers, co-location, and managed DCs. (A managed DC can be a secure room in a DC "complex" that shares all the heavy infrastructure of DCs.)
Primarily, the FedEx managers are committing the company long-term to Oracle/Microsoft platforms. Probably mostly to benefit their own careers.
Outsourcing hosting and management of DCs would have been something different, and probably healthier for FedEx and the industry.
There is a smooth curve between cloud and dedicated DCs, which has various levels of managed servers, co-location, and managed DCs. (A managed DC can be a secure room in a DC "complex" that shares all the heavy infrastructure of DCs.)
Primarily, the FedEx managers are committing the company long-term to Oracle/Microsoft platforms. Probably mostly to benefit their own careers.
Outsourcing hosting and management of DCs would have been something different, and probably healthier for FedEx and the industry.