Oracle has learned to love the Cloud – or at the very least to love the potential revenue stream that it hopes will come from the Cloud market.
And having learned to love the Cloud, the next step is to love all kinds of Cloud. Oracle President Mark Hurd boasts:
“This portfolio is the most complete portfolio in the IT industry, end to end. There isn't a piece part in this portfolio that isn't best of breed or on its way over time with the roadmaps we've disclosed, the best of breed. You can mix and match those solutions into whatever delivery vehicles optimized for you. A region can be SaaS public cloud. Another region can be on-site, and you can change your mind – [it’s a] huge competitive advantage for the company. ”
Ok, so fair enough, that’s the sales pitch pretty much as Larry Ellison outlined it at Oracle OpenWorld, but what’s the down and dirty version. Thomas Kurian, executive vice president for product development, argues:
“It's very simple. We're going to deliver through cloud.oracle.com, a public Cloud environment, where a customer of Oracle's can go and get access to our database online, our WebLogic server online, can get our CRM applications online, can get our Human Capital Management applications, Talent Management, Social Networking and security all online. As a user, you go to our cloud.oracle.com, you pick a service, you select a specific plan you want, you enter your credit card number, get your credentials and you get going 20 minutes later. ”
He adds:
“You have the ability to provision your Cloud. You can choose from a variety of different configurations for the services. For the database, you can say how much storage do you want, how much data transfer do you want. You choose it yourself. Once we provision the Cloud for you, and in the instance for you, you can manage it yourself. We give you a version of enterprise management called Cloud Manager, where you can manage it yourself. If you want to figure out service levels, how much down time I've had, how many users in minor acts in the system, how many transactions went through the system, you don't have to call Oracle. Self-service monitoring [means] we give you a simple interface where you can go and get all the SLAs about your service, cloud.oracle.com. ”
But while Oracle loves the Cloud, it’s still not enamoured of the concept of multi-tenancy. Kurian explains:
“Our Cloud runs on Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic. All the databases are isolated database instances, isolated to the physical schema level, not multi-tenant from the point of view of data striping within the database. All the middle tiers run with virtualized instances using the virtualization capabilities that we offer as part of Exalogic. So you get lasting capacity. The data is 100% isolated at the disk, at the table space, in the database, on the wire, in the application, out on the network to the user. For every tenant, these are 100% isolated from every other tenant. ”
An Oracle differentiator, he adds, is the ability to run all applications on one Cloud instance:
“We're the only Cloud that runs standard Oracle database applications and standard Java EE applications. You don't have to say, ‘Our Cloud only runs CRM. You want HR? Take the data out of our Cloud, put it in somebody else's Cloud, that's your problem’. We don't do that. We give you CRM, HR, database, Java, talent management, all in one cloud, all integrated, you don't have to move anything around on your own. We will run not just our applications, but any third-party application that connects to our Fusion SaaS offerings, our database Cloud, our Java Cloud. It's the only Cloud with the complete suite of SaaS applications. HR, CRM, talent, etc etc. We are the only one that offers all of them, which eliminates the need for them to have fragmented data across 16 different Clouds. ”
Another critical difference between Oracle and the Cloud pureplays is that Oracle still keeps a profitable foot in the on premises camp. Kurian argues it’s vital that customers are able to make the choice for themselves:
“The choice of whether you go SaaS or whether you go on premise, for many customers [that’s] the question of how they're managing operating expense versus capital expense. Right now, that changes over time for different customers. Because it's the same code base that runs in the Cloud and on premise, you can start in our Cloud and one day in the future, tell us ‘we want to take it back on premise’, and of course you can take it. ”
So Oracle has learned to love the Cloud. Whether the market will love the Oracle version of the Cloud remains to be seen of course, but from being the 'great unmentionable' of a few years ago the Cloud has been buffed up into a shining jewel in the software giant's crown.
