Selecting a Cloud Service: 5 Questions to Ask Prospective Providers
At an Oracle CloudWorld event this week, Oracle announced that it will give internal IT organizations the option of deploying and managing the software services that make up the Oracle Public Cloud Service on their own private cloud.
Oracle president Thomas Kurian says that once Oracle software and services are deployed on a private cloud, IT organizations will then be able to seamlessly invoke them on the Oracle Public Cloud service as well. Management of those services is accomplished using the same Oracle Enterprise Manager platform those organizations have already installed on premise. The goal is to enable IT organizations to make use of disaster recovery, workload migration, cloud bursting and application test and development services using a single REST application programming interface and associated scripting toolkits.
While Oracle has been arguably late to the public cloud game, it expects to be able to leverage its huge presence within on-premise IT environments to drive adoption of a complementary set of Oracle public cloud services. Up until now, however, those public cloud services were managed by Oracle. Now Oracle is giving internal IT organizations more control over those services as part of a larger hybrid cloud computing strategy.
In the case of Oracle, the public cloud service encompasses infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings and a suite of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. Today Oracle also announced that its supply chain and manufacturing SaaS applications are now generally available, and that it plans to also make available a financial consolidation application. IT organizations can mix and match these services any way they see fit, including opting to deploy a wide assortment of open source technologies as alternatives to proprietary Oracle technologies.
In general, Kurian says, Oracle is focused on not only providing access to a more flexible set of IT services that can easily scale up and down, it is reducing the total cost of operating that environment using what amounts to a virtual data center in the cloud that is defined by software. Prices for Oracle services deployed on premise are going to be exactly the same as they are on the Oracle Public Cloud. Those services can be deployed on three classes of integrated Oracle platforms running Oracle IaaS software. It’s then up to the IT organization to decide what to deploy on that hardware. The internal IT organization can either manage that platform themselves or have Oracle personnel manage it remotely on their behalf.
It remains to be seen whether the decision to use a particular cloud service will be decided by the IT professionals that Oracle normally engages with, or if that decision has already been made by developers who have pushed their organizations into the arms of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or IBM Bluemix services.
