Oracle finally succumbs to the cloud

Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison said his company was ready to offer "the most comprehensive cloud on the planet" during a webcast yesterday.

Dubbed Oracle Cloud, Ellison said the suite of products had "been a long time coming".

"We made a decision to rebuild all of our applications for the cloud almost seven years ago," he added.

It took seven years of work, thousands of people and billions of dollars to make the transition to the cloud.

"It took seven years of work, thousands of people and billions of dollars to make the transition from being an on-premise application provider to a cloud application provider, as well as an on-premise provider."

The venture was previously known as "Project Fusion" and Ellison acknowledged that one of Oracle's rivals jokingly dubbed it "Project Con-fusion".

He said the Oracle Cloud was a fully-fledged cloud with everything an organisation would need, including services for platforms, applications, customer infrastructure and social. It incorporates the company's suite of Fusion applications, offered with both SaaS and PaaS features.

It also includes its Java Cloud Service and Database Cloud Service, as well as Oracle Social Network, which is billed as a competitor to Salesforce's Chatter.

"Having socially enabled application doesn't mean we have a social network," Ellison explained, adding that this was only part of the puzzle.

He said that the company now has social services that allow it to perform "social relationship management" which meant working with people and building relationships before they become customers.

Oracle recently bought two companies - Vitrue and Collective Intellect. Their respective products analyse Facebook and Twitter streams to create marketing campaigns.

Oracle Cloud is launching more than 100 standards-based, enterprise-grade applications ERP (enterprise resource planning), CRM (customer relationship management), HCM (human capital management), talent management and other software categories.

Industry standards include HTML5, SQL, and Java. He said the Oracle Cloud would be running on Exadata and Exalogic Databases.