That Larry Ellison, what a joker, eh?
There was that hilarious gag when he said that cloud computing was a load of gibberish. And don’t forget that rib-tickling double act with Marc Benioff, when he got the Salesforce boss banned from the Oracle conference. And then there was last year’s gagfest when Larry Ellison claimed to have invented the concept of cloud computing – that one brought the house down.
Oh, hang on, Ellison was widely misquoted and misinterpreted last year: it was the journalists who got hold of the wrong end of the stick. At least, that’s what Oracle’s Dermot O'Kelly told a bunch of British journalists at an Oracle post-Open World event. It was being held to make sure that journalists fully understood the importance of Oracle’s recent announcements and didn’t take Ellison’s little jokes too seriously.
O’Kelly, whose daytime job (when not acting as warm-up man for Ellison’s gags) is senior vice-president for the Oracle UK, Ireland and Israel, explained that what Larry meant when he talked about the sudden advent of cloud was that the technology was nothing new.
All of which was a preamble to the guts of the meeting and that was to assert that Oracle’s cloud is now fully formed and, with the cloud enrichment in the Oracle 12c database, the company is now ready to offer ‘cloud at every level’, no less
With an in-memory capability engineered ‘quite differently’ to SAP’s approach with HANA (i.e. engineered to a specific Intel chipset), Oracle’s In-Memory DataBase (IMDB) cloud power can be simply ‘switched on’ with a simple set of SQL language instructions to ramp up application performance by what is claimed to be 100x times and more.
In terms of the central technology proposition, here’s how it works. “Our apps strategy is the same as our cloud strategy,” is the official company line. The Oracle cloud is a compendium of componentised resources dedicated to specific work functions stemming from an industry sector agnostic central core.
Revolving around this core are central functions including ERP (enterprise resource management) and the cheesily named but still important CX (customer experience) discipline. Central also is HCM (for human capital management) where Oracle has made specific acquisitions to deliver talent management and human resources functions, all from its all-encompassing cloud.
So also in this last 12 months we have seen Oracle get particularly lovey-dovey with the likes of Microsoft and Salesforce, and this is part of the strategy to bring credibility to the new applications cloud. The firm also hopes credibility hinges on the structure of the Oracle apps cloud; surrounded as it is by Saturn-like rings of circulating mobile connectivity, social connection and (of course) analytics at all times.
But is all of this enough to elevate Oracle from a purveyor of "false cloud", to use Benioff's words, to be a real cloud player?
Remember, Oracle’s cloud vision is Database-as-a-Service first. This runs on Oracle Infrastructure-as-a-Service with elastic storage allocations and OpenStack compatibility for openness. Then all of this also benefits from the recently bolted-on Java-as-a-Service, which as we know is basically dedicated WebLogic clusters running as a service on the Oracle Virtual Machine. All of this is wrapped up and offered in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace and can be accessed for the most part via the Oracle Mobile Cloud Service. There’s also an Object Storage cloud; Business Intelligence cloud; Documents cloud; Database Backup cloud; and a Billing & Revenue Management cloud.
It’s the Oracle cloud smorgasbord for sure and although there is no reason to necessarily doubt the firm’s ability to engineer intra- and inter-technology group interconnectivity and compatibility, one hopes that the firm has been dogfooding on its own-branded Oracle Talent Management Cloud to ensure all these elements work together.
One thing is clear, after its initial scepticism, Oracle has a host of cloud offerings – and we’re not talking about “false cloud” any more. We’ll certainly not hear it from Salesforce’s Benioff, now they’re best buddies again – and why should we? The Oracle Cloud Marketplace looks a lot like Salesforce’s AppExchange – what do they say about imitation and flattery?
After the false down of some non-cloud, cloud services, Oracle now seems to be getting the message. There’s nothing very innovative here but at least the company is offering something akin to what most of us would recognise as cloud.
But here’s the thing: Oracle is not setting the pace when it comes to cloud, it’s trailing way behind the real pace-setters in this marketplace and looks very unlikely to take a lead any time now. But Oracle does have a huge installed user base, it has a variety of customers who know they need to explore cloud services but don’t know where to begin and especially don’t know how to integrate some of their legacy stuff.
And look who’s coming along just in time? Why it’s Oracle: the enterprise’s friend with a complete range of cloud services, ready to fit every eventuality. It may not be cleverest offering in town, it may not be setting the pace and may not be transforming businesses but it does have a huge customer base and a cloud product for every occasion … and that’s no joke.
