Larry Ellison has of course had major problems with the terminology up until now, so it perhaps shouldn't have come as any great surprise when one of the first actions of the new Oracle regime at Sun Microsystems was the canning of the latter's public Cloud initiative.
Among the reassuring noises over the future of Java was the killing off of Sun's OpenCloud platform, which had been positioned as a potential rival to Amazon's public Cloud offering. "We're not going to be offering the Sun Cloud service," said Edward Screven, Oracle's chief corporate architect. "We don't plan on being in the rent-by-minute computer business.”
According to the Oracle roadmap, Sun's Cloud technology will now be integrated into the database firm's own Cloud services, which will target service providers looking to roll out their own public Clouds or end user enterprises that want to build their own private Clouds.
But Oracle is not about to cede any claims to the Cloud market with product development vice president Richard Sarwal arguing that Oracle is able to offer a "Cloud in a box". Conceding that "there were some very interesting technologies that Sun built over time", Sarwal confirmed: "Sun had some public cloud services and those Cloud services are going to be discontinued immediately."
There will be some Cloud activity related to OpenOffice.org which will be managed as an independent business unit. Oracle plans to deliver a Cloud offering called Oracle Cloud Office, which Screven said had been under development for a while. Oracle also plans to continue Sun's "desktop to datacentre virtualisation strategy", and expects to continue Sun's desktop virtualisation products, namely VDI, Secure Global Desktop, Sun Ray and Virtualbox.
With IBM clearly in the firm's sights, Oracle President Charles Phillips said Oracle wants its newly enlarged portfolio to serve customers who are looking for complete, integrated and engineered systems, following years of having to build systems "in a very manual, labour-intensive way". He argued that no other vendor could offer the same complete range of storage, servers, middleware, database, applications and management tools. "You'd select a lot of components from different suppliers, we'd deliver those components to you, then you'd hire a lot of integrators to come in and hopefully get them to work together and find some combination that seems to work," said Phillips.
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