Larry Ellison and Thomas Kurian are Oracle’s two top technology leaders, and by the time they each had spoken at Oracle OpenWorld on Tuesday, one thing was clear: Oracle plans to compete hard in all three corners of the cloud technology landscape—applications, platforms, and infrastructure.
Start with the corner, infrastructure as a service, where Amazon and Microsoft are leaders. Kurian in his Tuesday morning keynote laid out four flavors of Oracle infrastructure as a service (IaaS): elastic compute where a company shares servers with other customers for pay-per-use online computing; dedicated compute where a customer gets its own boxes in cloud; and two high-performance systems, where companies get Oracle Exadata or big data appliances as cloud services.
Oracle President Thomas Kurian at Oracle OpenWorld 2015.
Then, in his Tuesday afternoon keynote, Ellison raised the IaaS stakes: Oracle intends to sell its dedicated computing for half the current price of Amazon’s elastic compute, he said.
“We play at all three levels of the cloud, because, funny thing, we went into the SaaS business only to discover to be successful in the SaaS business, we had to also be in the PaaS business so people could extend the applications,” Ellison said. “And then we discovered to be successful in the PaaS business, we had to be in the infrastructure business, because people wanted to use our database PaaS service, but write applications in any language they wanted, not just Java.”
PaaS and SaaS Momentum
Ellison is Oracle’s CTO and executive chairman, and Kurian is president of product development. While the two leaders made a splash with cloud infrastructure announcements Tuesday, it’s the two other cloud pillars—platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS)—where Oracle has its most momentum with customer adoption (such as more than 1,300 cloud ERP customers) and its deepest product lineups. Oracle has more than 600 SaaS products, as well as PaaS products that range from Oracle Database to Java integration cloud services.
Ellison and Kurian both discussed a slew of new SaaS and PaaS products and features. Here are just two examples, one from each of those two cloud pillars.
Cloud Platform: Tools To Understand Big Data
Kurian highlighted three new data analysis cloud services, aimed at three different tiers of knowledge workers who do data analysis—data scientists, professional analysts, and the rest of us.
For data scientists, Oracle offers Oracle Big Data Cloud Service, Oracle Big Data Preparation Cloud Service, and Oracle Big Data Discovery Cloud Service. Those services let data scientists manage and analyze huge data sets using familiar (to them) tools such as Hadoop and SQL queries. For professional analysts, Oracle has tools for integration and business intelligence. And for the rest of us, Oracle Data Visualization Cloud Service provides advanced, chart-driven analysis that lets us sift through data without having to call in the data scientists and PhDs.
“You can do analysis, and there are only two guiding principles to it,” Kurian said of Data Visualization. “You only need to have a spreadsheet. And you only need to have a browser. You load your data with spreadsheets, you do analysis from a browser or phone.”
Software as a Service: Cloud For Manufacturing
Oracle’s latest SaaS addition is a cloud application to manage the manufacturing process, which Ellison announced this week as part of Oracle’s supply chain suite.
Oracle Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison at Oracle OpenWorld 2015.
“I believe we're the only ones with a comprehensive suite of discrete manufacturing [applications] in the cloud, period,” Ellison said. “We're the first and only one to offer this in the cloud.”
Oracle has spent the past decade rewriting its applications for the cloud, and it now has virtually its entire software portfolio as cloud services, Ellison said. That includes apps for ERP, enterprise performance management, human capital management, marketing, sales, service, commerce, supply chain, and more.
“Let me be clear. This is 100%, every line of code rewritten on top of Fusion middleware,” Ellison said. “… This is not relabeling 20-year-old, 10-year-old code. This was a huge effort.”
For most cloud companies, a cloud manufacturing application might be the centerpiece of a user conference. Same goes for cloud analytics services that traverse the red-hot segments of big data analytics and data visualization. For Ellison and Kurian, these services were just one of many, providing the latest pieces in Oracle’s portfolio of cloud services.
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