Oracle Opens Up With Cloud Marketplace And OpenStack Connectivity

Thomas Brewster,
Oracle cloud biplane aircraft © Anatoliy Lukich Shutterstock

Oracle getting a lot more open, even if Larry Ellison is more interested in his sailing team

The Oracle Cloud has opened up greatly this week, with announcements of OpenStack integration and a marketplace for partners to deliver services over the software giant’s infrastructure, at the OpenWorld event in San Francisco.

It marks a significant change for Oracle, which has been criticised over the years for being too closed. The OpenStack announcement is notable, allowing the company’s elastic compute services to be orchestrated with the open source software and allowing compatibility with other OpenStack clouds.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison © drserg ShutterstockOpenStack love everywhere

When Oracle bought Nimbula, a cloud operating system provider and OpenStack contributor, earlier this year, some saw it as a sign of Larry Ellison’s firm entering the open source cloud community, which includes the likes of HP, Rackspace, Dell and IBM.

In announcing its plans for integrating Nimbula Director yesterday, Oracle said it was tying its Exalogic-based private cloud offerings with OpenStack APIs, meaning customers could “seamlessly move workloads from Oracle Exalogic to Oracle Public Cloud and back”.

Evidently, Oracle sees OpenStack at the heart of the hybrid cloud model, which many customers are keen for, using both the Nova and Swift aspects of OpenStack, for compute and storage management respectively.

As for the Oracle Cloud Marketplace, it comes with a  searchable interface and allows developers to push out and monetise applications via another avenue. So-called “frenemy” Salesforce has been doing something similar on its AppExchange for some time now.

“The Oracle Cloud Marketplace is specifically designed to help organisations quickly and easily find, evaluate, and purchase the applications they need to reach their business goals,” said Steve Miranda, executive vice president of applications development at Oracle.

The company also announced database-as-a-service and Java-as-a-service offerings too, again following in the footsteps of rivals like Salesforce who have similar products.

Meanwhile, Ellison has peeved people who are at Oracle OpenWorld this week, as he skipped a keynote so he could watch one of the America’s Cup races in which he has a participating team – Oracle Team USA.

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