Oracle Flexes Cloud Muscles

5 Lessons to Brush Up Your Cloud Security Knowledge

At the Oracle Open World 2015 conference this week, Oracle fleshed out a comprehensive approach to the cloud that spans everything from new applications being unfurled in the cloud to updates to the IT infrastructure that those applications run on.

At the highest level of the cloud, Oracle announced that it is adding a manufacturing application to its supply chain management (SCM) portfolio of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, while at the same time enhancing its customer experience (CX) and e-commerce applications, updating its human resource software by adding support for learning and training modules, and then adding 190 features to Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud. In addition, Oracle unfurled a new Oracle Data Visualization Cloud through which end users can visualize and analyze data they load directly into the Oracle cloud.

At the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) level, Oracle unveiled a service for running Docker containers on the Oracle PaaS and an instance of Hadoop in the cloud that comes with a variety of complementary Big Data services, along with a multitenant implementation of its WebLogic application server software and a raft of updates to its application development and data integration tools that now span multiple programming languages.

Oracle also announced that the Oracle Cloud Platform for Integration portfolio now spans Oracle IoT Cloud, Oracle Integration Cloud, Oracle SOA Cloud, and Oracle API Manager Cloud.

At the database level, Oracle revealed that release 2 of Oracle Database 12c is now in beta which, among other things, will make it easier to move Oracle databases across hybrid clouds.

Meanwhile, at the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) level, Oracle added additional storage options and an elastic compute capability to complement an existing dedicated service while also announcing that there are now instances of the Exadata database machine in the Oracle Cloud. Oracle this week also expanded a relationship with Intel to optimize the performance of its software on the latest generation of Intel processors.

Finally, to address the management of all its offerings on premise and off, Oracle announced Oracle Management Cloud for IT Operations.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison says that as far as Oracle software running in the cloud is concerned, IT organizations will be hard pressed to find any alternative that costs less than the combined SaaS, PaaS and IaaS portfolio that Oracle has pulled together. All told, Ellison says Oracle will generate $426 million in SaaS and PaaS revenue in the fourth quarter of 2015, and is on track to generate over $1.5 billion in SaaS and PaaS revenue for its fiscal year. As such, Ellison says that Oracle is now in a position to dominate the continued evolution of cloud computing in the enterprise.

Obviously, Oracle is making it clear that it’s serious about moving application workloads to the cloud. But at the same time, Oracle is promising the ability to move workloads across hybrid cloud computing environments at the push of a button. Once that occurs, the line between where one cloud computing environment begins and another ends will blur to the point where it may soon be all but indistinguishable.