Oracle Announces Cloud Offering

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.