Apps, social, platform: Oracle aims for planet Earth's broadest cloud

Former cloud sceptic Oracle has taken the wraps off a new unified cloud strategy.

The strategy update, unveiled on Wednesday, launched a suite of platform-as-a-service offerings for enterprise developers along with hosted versions of Oracle's apps and a newly defined suite of 'cloud social services' for businesses.

"We are now announcing the most comprehensive cloud on the planet Earth," Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison said in a statement. "Most cloud vendors only have niche assets. They don't have platforms to extend."

The platform-as-a-service element of the strategy offers developers a platform on which to build apps using the Oracle Database and WebLogic-based Java services. Developers can also use the platform for building web apps with PHP, Ruby and Python, and native or HTML5-based mobile apps.

Oracle's unified cloud strategy also includes document services for creating online workspaces and portals for collaboration, website management tools and analytics services.

The company's own range of enterprise applications, which it will host in cloud form on its infrastructure, spans business intelligence, social and mobile tools. The integrated package on offer will take in ERP, recruitment, lifecycle management, sales, marketing and customer service applications.

We are now announcing the most comprehensive cloud on the planet Earth.

– Larry Ellison, Oracle

The 'social services' platform is aimed at two things, namely letting businesses interact with their customers through public social networks, and providing businesses with internal social networks. The secure internal tool is simply called 'Social Network', and the new Social Data Services aggregate data from both public social networks and enterprise data sources.

There are also two other toolsets targeting marketing departments: Social Marketing and Engagement Services for publishing, managing and reporting on social marketing campaigns; and Social Intelligence Services for analysing social media interactions.

Oracle Cloud's infrastructure is based on the company's Exalogic and Exadata systems, and operates on a self-service basis.

The move builds on Oracle's launch of a public cloud last October, and completes the transition of cloud capabilities that Oracle announced in 2010 from third-party Amazon infrastructure to its own.