News

Oracle 'Completes' Its Cloud Platform

• By John K. Waters
• June 23, 2015

All applications offered by Oracle Corp. are heading for the cloud -- if they're not there already. That was Oracle founder and executive chairman Larry Ellison's pledge yesterday at a press conference, during which his company announced a major expansion of its cloud platform.

"You can take virtually all of your applications out of the datacenter and move them to the Oracle cloud," Ellison told reporters and analysts gathered at the company's Redwood Shores, Calif., headquarters. "Not just Oracle applications, not just Oracle databases and Java applications, but all of your applications, third-party applications, [and] custom applications. Everything can be moved from your datacenter to the Oracle cloud, easily, with the push of a button."

Ellison and Oracle president Thomas Kurian unveiled more than 24 new cloud-based services, including analytics for data visualization, content and collaboration services, and compute and storage cloud services. The new offerings span software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), which Ellison said now makes his company's cloud portfolio "complete."

"We've entered a new era of cloud commuting," Ellison said. "Our strategy to play at all three levels of the cloud is to move all of your data into the Oracle cloud. We're near completing the process of moving all of our technology from on-premise to the cloud."

"And everything we do at all three layers of the cloud is based on standards," Ellison added. "... OpenStack, the Linux operating system, the Zen VM; all of our applications are written in Java. Everything is based 100 percent on industry standards, which is different from other clouds in the marketplace."

Ellison pointed to one of its new services, Archive Storage Cloud Service, as an example of the company's strategy to compete head to head with Amazon Web Services (AWS). He claimed Archive Storage is one-tenth the price of the comparable Amazon's Glacier storage service. "Oracle is the only company on the planet that can deliver a complete, integrated, standards-based suite of services at every layer of the cloud," he said. "Those technology advantages enable us to be much more cost-effective than our competitors."

"Isn't it interesting?" he added. "Our primary competitor used to be IBM [and SAP]. It is now Amazon .... They're not a bookstore only anymore."

The market landscape has "changed fundamentally," Ellison said. Along with Amazon, Oracle's main competitors are now Salesforce.com, Workday, and Microsoft, he said.

The company is also bringing its Exadata database platform to the cloud in the form of the Oracle Database Cloud. It's adding the Oracle Big Data Cloud Service and Big Data SQL Cloud Service to provide a platform for running workloads on Hadoop and NoSQL databases (read more about that on our sister site, Visual Studio Magazine). The new Oracle Integration Cloud Service is designed to simplify integration between the cloud and on-premises Oracle and third-party applications. The Oracle Mobile Cloud Service offers a new mobile-back-end-as-a-service (MBaaS), which allows developers to rapidly develop and deploy mobile apps integrated an enterprise-grade backend cloud infrastructure. And the Oracle Process Cloud Service makes it possible for business users to "innovate and deliver process applications independent of IT," without coding.