Oracle’s Deluge Of Cloud Services And Updates Chase PaaS and IaaS Markets

Oracle has announced a spate of cloud products, some of which build out is platform-as-a-service capabilities and others which aim to put it in contention with the likes of Amazon Web Services in the infrastructure-as-a-service arena.

The database giant also announced a swathe of partners to its new Oracle Cloud Managed Service Provider program, which allows partners to use the Oracle Cloud Platform and package it with their managed services offerings; notable partners so far include Deloitte, Fujitsu and PwC.

Platform-as-a-service

First off, Oracle announced its Database 12 Release 2 is being made available through the Oracle Cloud Platform in the database-as-a-service format. The new database makes use of multi-tenant architecture and in-memory capabilities.

Next is a service built on top of Oracle’s Exadata compute and storage system, imaginatively named the Exadata Express Cloud Service, aimed at offering small and medium businesses access to a platform optimised for running scaled-down Oracle databases at an affordable rate.

Some 19 new cloud services follow these announcements and include Oracles take on PaaS stack management, expanded cloud container use, expanded collaboration features in the Developer Cloud Service, and a boosted Oracle Mobile Cloud service that comes with chatbots and what Oracle calls “actionable insights”.

Standout cloud additions, include the Oracle Identity Cloud service, which offers a cloud-based security and identity platform that integrates with other cloud applications and allows access and identities to be managed across them and on-premise services.

Despite announcing the Oracle Management Cloud back in 2015, Oracle claims it is somehow new again with addition of machine learning to identify threats in the cloud service and provide early warning to its users, with these features being delivered through the Oracle Security Monitoring and Analytics Cloud service in the Management Cloud.

The Oracle Internet of Things (IoT) Cloud Service offers a way for businesses to suck up data from network connected sensors and use applications such as asset and production monitoring to track their operations through IoT devices, as well as use that harvested data with information from ERP and CRM systems and business applications like the Oracle Service Cloud, presumably allowing user to get a better real-time and contextual overview of their business operations.

The Oracle API Platform Cloud Service allows for the management of application programming interfaces (APIs) within the Oracle Cloud, other cloud or on-premise.

The Oracle Student Cloud offers universities a take on the Oracle Cloud Platform that allows them to store and process the records of their undergraduates.

Numerous other tweaks were announced as part of Oracles latest PaaS package, many seemingly presenting reworked version of the Oracle Cloud Platform designed for specific uses cases, rather than leaving it for the users to tweak the services for their specific use.

Despite the term cloud being banded around with abandon, it is worth noting that many of these services have an on-premise element to them, indicating Oracle may not be as zealous with its cloud future as the likes of Salesforce.

Infrastructure-as-a-service

Not shy in coming forward, Oracle’s executive chairman Larry Ellison claimed “Amazon’s lead is over” in the cloud infrastructure arena.

It was a bold statement given how Amazon Web Services currently leads the IaaS market with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform in subsequent second and third places. So Oracle needs something to backup Ellison’s bluster otherwise it was all just hot air at yet another flag-waving company conference.

To meet its goals of transforming the IaaS market, the Oracle Cloud Platform has gained bare metal servers for its public cloud and virtual cloud network offerings, the latter of which enables companies to make a step to the cloud from on-premise infrastructure without wholly migrating into the cloud.

Oracle claimed its new Ravello Cloud Service is the first of its kind to enable organisations to take enterprise VMware and kernel-based virtual machines workloads and run them in a public cloud without requiring any changes or reconfiguration, effectively making the transition from on-premise virtual workloads to running them in the cloud an easier process.

The Oracle Container Cloud service offers a way for companies to easily deploy application stack through Docker compatibility, while Oracle FastConnect has been designed to help customers connect their data centres to the cloud.

Finally, the Oracle Cloud Platform now supports Oracle MySQL Cloud Service, Oracle Big Data Cloud Service and Oracle Event Hub Cloud Service, alongside its other PaaS offerings.

Oracle may be late to the IaaS game, but expanding such infrastructure based services could see it levie some competition toward the bigger IaaS players, even if it only stick with targeting the infrastructure market.

There’s also significant scope for it to make headway with public cloud IaaS, given the growth of that cloud segment in 2016.

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