Oracle Finally Embraces Cloud

It has been quite a while since Oracle announced its cloud strategy. It was a long-awaited move, which was said to follow on-premise strategy. Amidst all the excitement of the CIOs who have been looking forward to the move, the announcement raises the question: How strong is their proposition to counter the delayed entry in the market? According to Oracle, the latency wasnt like enjoying summer on the beach-side, but waiting for the nebula of cloud computing to settle and getting the right and complete product solution at the right time.

A Complete Offer

Answering our concerns, Sushil Kumar, vice president, product strategy, business development says, This industry is fashion-driven where as soon a new technology comes, vendors were already talking about it, but all they were doing was repackaging the existing solution with cloud element in it; but for us, while others were busy making announcement, we were busy building new technology and new solutions. He adds, Over the time, cloud computing has evolved from several trends. Soon we will start hearing about the CIOs working on a strategy beyond infrastructure; today, cloud is just a logical next step of virtualization. Therefore we have built our strategy to take entire data center to the cloud, not only virtualization. So according to Oracles claim, there are a chosen few bringing middleware, applications, and database to the cloudit is unique at bringing the complete offer in one stack as Enterprise Manager 12g.

According to the company, the first step for many customers will be to consolidate onto a shared pool of resources, which could be at the PaaS (middle tier, database tier) or IaaS (VM/Compute tier). Private PaaS is the natural evolution for enterprise data centers. Oracles engineered systems, Exalogic and Exadata, provide the foundation blocks for Private PaaS and are great target platforms for consolidation.

No Strings Attached

Oracles offerings also incorporate features like masking information/database for security, built-in transparent encryption, and real application cluster. Oracle also ensured to bring seamless movement from private to public or vice versa, thus making the transition a non-proprietary affair. It claims to bring the same technology for public and private cloud, since they are not tied to virtualization and also agnostic to platformbe it for both x86 or SPARC. Recently, it announced 2 models of Oracle Exalogic Elastic CloudOracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2 with 64-bit x86 processors and a choice of Oracle Solaris or Oracle Linux, as well as Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud T3-1B with SPARC servers running Oracle Solaris. Furthermore, their Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud models are engineered hardware and software systems that leverage an InfiniBand based I/O fabric and solid-state storage with Oracle WebLogic Server and other enterprise Java Oracle middleware products.

Targeting Existing Customers

If we follow the theories, in a really competitive environment, a few common approaches are either a Blue Ocean Strategy of targeting a new set of customers, showcasing technology acumen, or packaging it to make the same offering more attractive. While Oracle could not target new customers, it chose a mix of two technologies in a complete package. However the point to ponder over is how many customers, from its existing customers with legacy systems, would still be pristine of cloud and have not signed any long-term contract with the competitors.