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Oracle unveils its public cloud

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled his company's entrance into the public cloud space, simply titled Oracle Cloud, on Wednesday afternoon.
Written by Rachel King, Contributor

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled his company's entrance into the public cloud space, simply titled Oracle Cloud, on Wednesday afternoon.

"It's been a long time coming," said Ellison. "We made a decision to rebuild all of our applications for the cloud almost seven years ago."

Ellison explained that the venture was previously dubbed "Project Fusion", but Ellison acknowledged that one of Oracle's competitors referred to it as "Project Confusion".

Also calling out the competition, without naming any company in particular, Ellison asserted that Oracle Cloud is a fully fledged cloud solution with everything a customer would need, with services for platform, application, custom infrastructure and social applications.

"Having [a] socially enabled application doesn't mean we have a social network," Ellison said, explaining that's only one part of the puzzle.

Ellison said that Oracle now has social services that allow the hardware and software giant to do something called "social-relationship management". Ellison remarked that it's a little different from customer-relationship management; rather, it's working with people before they are customers to build relationships so that they will become customers.

Oracle Cloud is rolling out more than 100 standards-based, enterprise-grade applications for services dedicated to databases, Java developers, mobile, analytics and more. Those industry standards include SQL, Java and HTML 5. Ellison quipped that naturally, the Oracle Cloud will be running on the Oracle Databases: Exadata and Exalogic.

"Your cloud data is not co-mingled with other customers' data," Ellison said. "It's a big difference between our cloud and other clouds provided in the market."

While simultaneously being advertised as the "most comprehensive cloud on planet Earth", another key element to Oracle Cloud that Ellison emphasised is customer freedom.

"We think a modern cloud lets you decide when you want to upgrade — not have the cloud vendor tell you when you upgrade to the next version of the software," Ellison said. "We will let you, within reason, schedule the upgrade."

Always one to repeat his belief in building technology upon "industry standards", Ellison noted that Flash is not involved, because then the cloud-based interfaces won't run on Apple's iPhone and iPad.

"Some people built their system with a Flash UI," Ellison remarked. "I won't mention Workday by name."

At the platform level, Ellison admitted that Oracle Cloud is "kind of similar to Amazon" because they're both elastic clouds, and most other competitors don't "respond to capacity on demand".

Ellison recited some other differences between Oracle Cloud and competitive offerings, including the ability to "move things gracefully back and forth" between the cloud and on-premise platforms, as well as allowing end users to develop and deploy websites without any assistance from programmers.

Essentially, Ellison reiterated that everything available to customers in the cloud is also available on-premise, and vice versa.

The company leader revealed that several "key strategic acquisitions" have helped make the Oracle Cloud happen, but he added that "simply buying things would not have been enough". Furthermore, Ellison explained to the audience made up of customers and media at Oracle's Redwood Shores headquarters that it took a long time and a lot of manpower and money to unveil a cloud offering of this kind and scale.

Ellison then pointed towards SAP, commenting that it "made a very interesting announcement" that it wouldn't have any cloud offerings until 2020. Ellison said that he understands this, but added that he doesn't expect SAP to even meet that deadline.

"2020: a terrible year to get into the cloud," Ellison joked to much laughter from the audience.

The Oracle Cloud is now available to customers.

Via ZDNet US

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