Given some of the less than wholeheated endorsements uttered by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, it's tempting to believe that the software giant is resistant to Cloud Computing. Not so, says Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of product development at Oracle, who argues that the company is at heart of the Cloud industry.

“We do have a Cloud Computing strategy, but we're just trying to be as specific about it as possible,” says Kurian. “Right now, every vendor in the industry is trying to jump on the Cloud Computing movement. It's a very fashionable term. But the question is: how do you define what is Cloud Computing?

"When we talk about Cloud Computing, we're talking about two specific things. The first is the ability to deploy information systems and applications in a pool of machines which can be on your premises or on someone else's. Typically that infrastructure will be virtualised so that you have work workloads moving around from one machine to another.

“The second aspect is that some vendors mean that Cloud Computing is about business applications and processes are delivered to you as a service.  Now these two things don't necessarily need to be coupled. You can run Software as a Service without running on a virtualised infrastructure and you can run a virtualised infrastructure within your own on premise data centre. Fusion Middleware 11g gives you the ability to do both.”

Already there?

So it's a case of Oracle does offer Cloud Computing, just not as something badged as such.“The reason we don't seperate out a version of our products as Oracle Cloud Middlware is that in the same data centre you can have a lot of the same requirements whether in The Cloud or on premise,” says Kurian. “For example, multi-tenancy is the hottest topic in SaaS, but if you go to a financial services operation running shared servies, then they need multi-tenancy. When we build software, we build it to be used for both on premise and in The Cloud. We design in features into our software that enable people to deliver services in The Cloud.”

Indeed Kurian argues that Oracle already has a significant Cloud footprint. “We don't offer a specific product called Oracle Cloud Platform, but all of the top ten SaaS firms use our middleware and database to run their operations,” he says “You can run our database and middleware in The Cloud. If Cloud vendors want to licence our  our software, we allow them to deploy our middleware and database on Amazon EC2.”

But Oracle won't be following the Amazon approach to Cloud platform provision. “Amazon offers you hardware and space,” says Kurian. “We don't see that as a profitable part of the market today. Whether we ever will be in it or not I'm not stating, but the economics are not profitable today. We don't believe that we want to get into that segment until the economics are better.”