Larry
Ellison announced the official release of the Oracle Cloud on Wednesday (6/6/2012).
The highlights of his announcement were:
CRM to SRM:
Oracle
is looking to extend the definition of Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
to Social Relationship Management (SRM).
Conceptually this implies looking beyond existing customers, to potential customers. Oracle’s
cloud platform provides hooks to Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn to facilitate
this approach.
Cloud Infrastructure Services:
Oracle
announced its own Public Cloud. The infrastructure supporting this Cloud
(Security / Monitoring / etc…) is provided as a set of cloud services. The
implication is that these services can be used as infrastructure components to
build out cloud based applications.
HTML 5:
Oracle
cloud based applications (including Fusion Applications) are HTML 5 compliant.
The implication is that they are implicitly mobile-aware. The applications can
run on iPhone / iPad / Android without additional development
PaaS:
Oracle’s
cloud includes Platform as a Service in two areas – Database and J2EE
containers. The implication is that Database “services” can now be provided
on-tap. Also Java applications can be deployed without requiring a parent Java
container to host them.
My key
takeaways were:
- Applications can be moved TO Oracle public cloud, and moved BACK on-premise. There is no vendor lock-in.
- Oracle Cloud Applications (including Fusion) are NOT multi-tenant. Each organization has its own virtual machine and its own data store. Important when it comes to data insulation concerns.
- Upgrades to applications hosted on Oracle public cloud are NOT mandated. Clients can choose when they would like to upgrade, based on their business cycles.
There
was the usual bashing of competitors:
SAP – SAP’s 2020 launch of Cloud based applications for their
SAP suite was ridiculed. The acquisition of SuccessFactors was portrayed as a
way to buy into the cloud arena
Salesforce.com -
Forced upgrades and multi-tenant model was portrayed as a raw deal to
clients
Workday – Their Flash based UI and
object-oriented data model was portrayed as a non-starter. The fact that they
do not have HTML 5 support was seen as an architecturally colossal mistake
Mark
Hurd announced Oracle Platinum Services.
This is a premium support service for Exadata / Exalogic / Exalytics /
SuperCluster.
