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Oracle goes cloud crazy

Jon Tullett
By Jon Tullett, Editor: News analysis
Johannesburg, 03 Oct 2012

Cloud services have featured heavily at OpenWorld this week, with Oracle announcing numerous new applications and fleshing out its strategy to deliver cloud services and infrastructure to customers.

The company will compete across the board with software and infrastructure providers, many of which use Oracle technology in their product lines already.

On the software side, Oracle is moving all of its applications into the cloud, intending to deliver its complete portfolio of enterprise software as services. "Our mission is very simple: to bring Oracle's enterprise technology - our database and our middleware - to any customer, any user, any partner anywhere in the world through the Internet browser," said Thomas Kurian, executive VP of product development at Oracle.

On the platform side, the company has followed last year's introduction of Oracle Cloud services with the announcement of private cloud infrastructure. Customers deploying a private cloud will host Oracle data centre equipment on their premises, with the hardware owned and managed by Oracle, but under the customer's control.

Differentiator

Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO, claims Oracle is unique because it offers SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS products, with a broader application portfolio than its competitors. In a market where standards-based best-of-breed cloud services can be mixed and matched, the benefit in offering all things to all men remains to be seen, but a more compelling argument is Oracle's consistency of platform from end-to-end, using the same technologies in-house or in the cloud.

"When you buy a SaaS application, you also acquire the underlying technology," Ellison said. "Even in the cloud, it's got to run on something - you're acquiring the underlying software, database, and programming language. You need to consider not just the application but also the platform on which it rests. We use the same platform to develop all our own applications. When you want to extend that application or interconnect other applications, you do so with the same tools we used to build it."

Oracle commits to ensuring that applications and data can be migrated seamlessly between customer servers, private clouds, and public cloud infrastructure, Ellison said. "A very common mode is going to be to do development and testing, and initial deployment in the cloud, then as deployment gets larger or if you're in a regulated industry, move the applications into a private cloud behind your firewall."

The consistent platform allows customers to easily mix-and-match cloud with internal services, and ensuring that management, security and policies are applied universally, Ellison said.

Oracle's private cloud hardware consists of the newly announced Exadata X3 and Exalogic X3 appliances, the same hardware deployed in the company's public cloud data centres. Using the same hardware and software stack throughout the network ensures applications will not need any reconfiguration to migrate, or use additional resources for peak periods.

No SA data centre

Oracle will make extensive use of its partner network to deliver cloud technologies to customers. Although a global push to deploy data centres is well under way, there is no news on a South African data centre, meaning public cloud projects will run internationally, or in certified partner data centres. The company expects to have South African partners certified in three to six months, an executive confirmed.

Oracle also unveiled partner programmes for cloud providers, including referral schemes, resale packages, and third-party solution builder interfaces.

The company announced preview versions of seven new cloud services, adding to the dozens of cloud apps already in the portfolio. The new services include Oracle Planning and Budgeting, Oracle Financial Reporting, Oracle Data and Insight, Oracle Social Sites, Oracle Developer, Oracle Storage, and Oracle Messaging.

Having famously mocked cloud computing hype as "gibberish" and "nonsense" in the past, Ellison has now focused on growth in the cloud rather than by acquisitions. "We're not focused on any large acquisitions. We think the organic growth opportunity is in the cloud," he told CNBC. That is a substantial strategic change for a company which has been famously acquisition-hungry, making around 80 acquisitions in the last decade, including major players such as Siebel, PeopleSoft, and Sun Microsystems.

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