News

Oracle Packages Big Data Services in New Cloud Platform

• By David Ramel
• October 29, 2015

At its OpenWorld 2015 conference this week, Oracle Corp. added the Oracle Cloud Platform for Big Data to its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings. The platform will consist of some existing services being joined by several new services providing functionality such as data preparation, a NoSQL database and more.

"Big Data is helping customers address critical areas: improving customer experience, reducing churn, streamlining operations and building Internet of Things (IoT) applications," Oracle exec Thomas Kurian said in a statement. "We're already seeing it on-premises where our Big Data business is growing faster than the market as a whole. With Oracle's new Cloud Platform for Big Data, we're delivering on our promise to enable customers to take advantage of the same technologies on-premises and in the cloud and widening Oracle's lead in cloud computing."

Being added to the company's existing offerings -- Big Data Cloud Service and Big Data SQL Cloud Service -- are Big Data Preparation Cloud Service, GoldenGate Cloud Service, Big Data Discovery Cloud Service and NoSQL Database Cloud Service.

The Oracle Big Data Preparation Cloud Service provides automated ingestion, preparation, repair, enrichment and governance of data. It uses machine learning that leverages Apache Spark technology, combined with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Linked Open Data sets to enrich data.

The Oracle GoldenGate Cloud Service moves data into Big Data lake and data warehouse cloud services to simplify the integration of on-premises databases and cloud-based Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS), Hadoop, Spark and NoSQL data services.

The Oracle Big Data Discovery Cloud Service is described as a complete solution to help companies get started quickly with Big Data analytics, obviating the need to learn complex architectures or specialty tools, or depend on expert resources.

The Oracle NoSQL Database Cloud Service targets simple operations on collections of data residing in key-value stores.

Those services join the existing Oracle Big Data Cloud Service, providing a platform on which to run diverse workloads on Hadoop, Spark and NoSQL databases. Another existing service, the Oracle Big Data SQL Cloud Service, extends the company's SQL implementation to Hadoop and NoSQL.

"Cloud delivery, consumer applications, and ubiquitous mobility have fundamentally altered how users engage with their data, creating new expectations about ease-of-use and access," the company quoted Ovum analyst Tom Pringle as saying. "Oracle has been a key participant in the development of Big Data trends, offering hardware and software for handling use cases encompassing Big Data and traditional analytics, information discovery, data wrangling, self-service analytics, and real-time operational transactions. Oracle has extended its portfolio to provide customers a unified Big Data management solution strategy that interweaves Big Data analytics with traditional and exploratory BI, while providing common and consistent methods to govern and support the discovery and consumption of Big Data."

Oracle said its cloud -- which it has positioned as a challenger to established market leaders Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform -- now supports more than 70 million users who conduct more than 34 billion transactions each day. The company said its cloud runs on more than 50,000 devices and can store more than 800 petabytes of data in 19 global datacenters.

In addition to its Big Data cloud moves, Oracle this week announced the addition of JavaScript to its cloud-based development tooling and partnerships with Xamarin and Sencha for mobile development integration.