Oracle: Love, Hate, Love

With all respect to our CEO, you must take his words with a pinch of salt,"
told a senior executive of Oracle to this writer, about three years back, in the
context of Oracles strategy to address the SMB segment. One can easily extend
the piece of advice to cloud as well.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellisons "rantings" about cloud computingnot more than two
years backhave by now become legendary. Yet, dismissing Oracle as a serious
cloud player is the last thing that one would afford to do. And it is not the
evolution alone that we are talking about. Even at that time, in September 2008
Oracle OpenWorld, when Ellison was bestowing choicest adjectives upon the cloud
concept"nonsensical", "insane" and "stupidest" thingOracle had already put its
Amazon Web Services partnership in place, offering Oracle 11g database, Oracle
Fusion Middleware, Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Enterprise Linux to run
in the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment. Customers
were even offered to use their existing licenses for those products on Amazon
EC2 without additional fees.

So, it was a thought-out, coherent strategy even then, contrary to what
Ellison said"Maybe well do an ad. I dont understand what we would do
differently in the light of cloud computing other than ... change the wording on
some of our ads." And that was a full one and half years before its
well-publicized world tour, which, started in February this year, and at the
time of writing, is yet to be completed.

Coherent, Not Complete

So those who thought that Oracles cloud strategyif something like that
existsis just half-hearted bits and pieces, arbitrarily put together, they are
terribly mistaken. Right from those days, Oracle knew what it was doing. It
chose the leading cloud provider of that timeAmazon Web Services. It put all
its systems and management tools in the cloud. And it did not put any
applications out there. It reminds of the stand that Nokia took in the 90s, when
it was a leading player in telecom infrastructure as well. In the bitter CDMA vs
GSM debate, Nokia was clearly supporting GSM when it came to infrastructure,
criticizing CDMA. Yet, it licensed CDMA for its handsets. As the leading vendor
of handsets, it could not afford not to be there in an area, that may be the
second best, or third, but which had some promise. Oracle is precisely doing the
same. It is the leading vendor of database and now middleware. It cannot afford
to miss anything that would have some impact.

So, the coherence is not really in question.

And Amazon is also not the last word youve heard from the worlds largest
database maker (Sorry Larry, but that is how the world at large still recognizes
you the best). This is the official position of Oracle on that, "Our intent is
to expand our current and future cloud offering to other platforms. The decision
regarding which platforms we support next and the associated timelines will be
primarily based on customer demand."

What is in question is: does this world tour mean that Oracle has embraced
cloud completely? Far from that. Even today, we do not know what its strategy is
when it comes to offering applications on an on-demand model, let alone cloud.
We are toldunofficially by a number of Oracle executivesthat the decision on
the SaaS offerings would be based on significant local market considerations.
So, if India and China need it, it would be available in those markets.

What is surprising is that we have not yet seen a big cloud strategy around
Sun Microsystems technologies. One important change between September 2008 and
today, is that then the company did not have the Java maker in its fold. That
makes Oracle potentially a big player in the cloud.

The only indication that is availableand it is only an indicationis
Oracles latest noise around private cloudsas a provider of tools and
technologies. Of course, it is in a far better position to do that with Sun in
its fold. In summary, Oracles cloud strategy is: go all out when it comes to
database and middleware, a wait and watch for apps, and a slow but steady
movement to preach private clouds.

Shyamanuja Das

shyamanujad@cybermedia.co.in