7th October 2011
Oracle went public this week, and not just to voice their growing distaste for noisy neighbours Salesforce, as the company launched their new global public cloud offering at Oracle Open World. But does their first serious move into cloud represent one of vision, reaction or just plain frustration? If a quote on their new public cloud website is anything to go by, the latter seems the likeliest at present: “For us, it's a lot of work. For you, it's the ease of the cloud.”
In fact, it’s been a week of frustration for Oracle and their resolute CEO, Larry Ellison. They kicked off their annual conference fighting fires related to last year’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and ended it hiding from the full-blown storm that was the unexpected cancellation of Marc Benioff’s mid-week keynote.
However, in among the hubbub there have been some pretty big announcements, and none bigger than yesterday’s confirmation by Ellison himself, that Oracle would be launching a new global public cloud.
Finally putting the company in direct competition with Rackspace, Amazon and none other than Salesforce, Oracle’s move will almost certainly quash the growing suggestion that the company had little or no cloud strategy.
It will also allow them to link together a number of new initiatives, including Fusion Apps and a new Oracle Social Network, released this week, to further enhance Ellison’s early week suggestion that the company was looking to build itself on a hardware-software fused business model, similar to Apple’s.
And its new public cloud service is an attractive proposition, based on the amount of global infrastructure Oracle has in place across the globe, and despite the likely annoyance cloud computing brings in terms of the changes the company has had to make recently.
Mixing PaaS and Saas capabilities, Ellison stated in his keynote that Oracle Public Cloud would enable customers to integrate Fusion apps, extensions, and custom-built apps. Along with a database service and a Java service for developers, customers could also take “standard Java and Oracle Database apps and deploy them on the Public cloud without rewriting them”.
What will be an even more attractive proposition (especially for established businesses) is the element of testing that can be done via Oracle Public Cloud:
“Oh and by the way, you can move it back if you want to,” Ellison stated.
“You can move it to the Amazon cloud if you want. You can do development and test on our cloud and go into production in your data center … and nothing changes. Everything is portable. Your data is portable.”
While questions still remain over the actual launch date of Public Cloud, many speculate it will be soon, in line with Fusion Apps already ready to purchase.
And despite the continuing ability Marc Benioff has had of getting under Larry Ellison’s skin (Ellison signed off his keynote by stating Oracle’s Public Cloud was better than Salesforce’s, which “puts your data at risk by commingling it with others”), Oracle will still come away from Open World happy with the amount of publicity they’ve managed to draw up.
The question now remains as to how they will deal with the most frustrating element of all - making the move into cloud, and actually getting everything to function properly.
Related stories: Oracle chief says Sun will rise alongside cloud and software
Tags: software as a service | infrastructure as a service | applications
