Oracle highlighted its cloud computing strategies, and goals at this year’s Oracle Open World in San Francisco. During the show, which has an estimated audience of 50,000 attendees from over 140 countries, Oracle introduced seven new cloud-based services, which augment Oracle’s comprehensive portfolio of platform services, application services and social services, all available on a subscription basis.
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Oracle’s CEO and founder Larry Ellison highlighted the cloud as well as social networking as key technologies to lead the company towards mass data. “With the announcements on Sunday, Oracle’s cloud offerings are moving from aspirational to actual. However, there is still a lot of work to be done,” said Carter Lusher, research fellow and chief analyst at Ovum. “It is Ovum’s opinion that the IaaS, PaaS, and private cloud offerings are useful for existing Oracle customers, but not particularly ground breaking nor differentiated from competitors like Amazon.”
According to Iraja Curts, CIO at Frimesa, who is attending the show, “Ellison spoke about big data … However, the company’s main approach converges on what Oracle appears to be most interested in at this point: hardware, highlighting Exadata, Exalogic, Exalystics.” Oracle released its Exalogic Elastic Cloud X3-2, the second hardware generation of the company’s flagship engineered system for running business applications. It is hardware and software engineered together.
Oracle aimed to show the cloud computing is a strategic and growing business. The new services include tools in the following areas: planning and budgeting; financial reporting; data and insight; social sites; developer; storage and messaging. They join the Oracle cloud applications, social and platform services.
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As complement, Oracle announced that more than 100 leading ISVs are integrating in the cloud with Oracle sales and marketing cloud service, a service available through Oracle Cloud.
Oracle has made several acquisitions to build its cloud portfolio over the past years. The company announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire SelectMinds, a provider of cloud-based social talent sourcing and corporate alumni management applications. This acquisition followed Oracle’s previous asset purchase of Skire, a provider of capital program management and facilities management applications, which are available both on-premise and in the cloud.
In June, the company bought social marketing and engagement platform Vitrue and cloud-based social intelligence firm, Collective Intellect.
Beyond cloud services
Oracle emphasized that it has the necessary maturity to bring to market what is really necessary for companies to engage in cloud computing. “The company stands to be in a third generation of cloud,” says Curtis. “It was clear that Oracle is actually presenting a much more consistent offer, however, it is essential for those who are considering adopting such a concept or solution to analyze it in detail, to ensure not only the positive ROI, but most of all to ensure the levels of service and safety.” CIO Iraja Curts.
During the show, Oracle has also shown that it is focusing on mobile. When announcing the availability of Oracle Fusion Tap, a native iPad application, the company claimed that it redefines the level of productivity users can achieve while on-the-go, helping users find and make the right connections.
It is designed specifically for the iPad and the mobile workforce and provides access with or without an Internet connection. Oracle explained that the Fusion Tap runs off cloud-based enterprise applications and across Oracle application cloud services, requiring only one simple Apple App Store installation.
Java was also a subject. As noted by Ovum’s Michael Azoff, the most significant development will be what’s coming up in 2013: the Java EE 7 release and JavaFX 2.2, which will support HTML5 and websockets (and REST and JSON).
In addition, Azoff also highlighted ADF Mobile, which extends Oracle application development framework to mobile users. “ADF Mobile makes sense for customers in the Oracle ecosystem, but will not have broad appeal in the wider market, whereas JavaFX on mobile is likely to get wider support in the broad IT market, and certainly will be welcomed by Java developers,” he said.
“Oracle continues to be a fast follower (e.g., IaaS and PaaS, and in-memory database), which is not a bad strategy. The key consideration is being fast enough to prevent the competition from establishing a dominate position in a new market,” noted Ovum’s Lusher.
>>> Check out all Oracle releases during Open World here.
