Oracle Corp. is making a bid to be the most expansive cloud infrastructure and application provider in the world.
The company announced at its annual OracleWorld conference in San Francisco on Tuesday that it is expanding Oracle Cloud services include Oracle Database as a Service, Oracle Java as a Service, and Oracle Infrastructure as a Service.
It ought to have been a triumphal moment. However, the announcement was supposed to be in a keynote made by company chair Larry Ellison. Instead, he delegated the job to executive vice-president Thomas Kurian because Ellison wanted to be on his racing yacht in a competition.
“By building upon the world’s broadest selection of flexible, reliable and secure enterprise cloud services, Oracle is perfectly positioned to help organizations unlock all the benefits of cloud computing,” said Kurian, who oversees the company’s product and cloud development. “With a comprehensive and growing set of functionally rich, integrated and secure cloud services, the Oracle Cloud provides customers with a variety of options through a full suite of application, social, platform, and infrastructure services.”
Kurian gave an energetic presentation. But his introduction was greeted with sparse applause, and, according to an IDG News report, a lot of people left the auditorium when they learned Ellison was a no-show.
Oracle Cloud already includes enterprise resource management (including project management), human capital management and customer relationship management subscription applications. The HR module is offered in 29 languages and is tailored for the regulations of 14 countries. Overall, Oracle Cloud has 20 million users, Kurian said, doing 19 billion transactions a day.
The new services include:
–Oracle Database as a Service provides full control of a dedicated database instance, supports any Oracle Database application, and gives users flexibility over their services Kurian said. It supports version 11G and 12.
Users can get a single node database, a database with DataGuard, or a rack cluster. It is administered through Enterprise Manager Express, like any on-premise Oracle database. Any tool that connects to an Oracle database works for uploading data. There is also a high availability option.
Ordering a rack cluster could take as little as five minutes, Kurian said.
–Oracle Java as a Service provides full control of dedicated Oracle WebLogic Server clusters and supports any Java application. It could be used for developing and testing applications.
Users can configure one or multiple WebLogic domains and get elastic workload scaling. All on-prem tools that work with WebLogic also work with the cloud version.
–The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a Service provides virtual compute and storage services.
It is compatible with OpenStack’s Nova cloud fabric controller, and its Swift object store.
“These are a full suite of platform services that complement our SaaS applications,” Kurian said.
You can use any programming language in the Oracle Cloud, he added, not only Java.
“This suite as a platform service gives you great agility,” he said. “It allows you to have a platform to extend your applications, and you also have a platform that can change the way you use and consume IT resources.” If a staffer wants to create a data mart, it can now be done in the Oracle [Nasdaq: ORCL] Cloud.
Oracle also said there will be a Business Intelligence Cloud that will allow users to analyze data in the Oracle Database Cloud, a Documents Cloud for file sharing and collaboration, a Mobile Cloud for building mobile apps, and a Cloud Marketplace where partners can publish applications and customers can find new solutions.
