It’s a Comprehensive Offering

The company that made its reputation selling secure databases has put a massive amount of time and money into the Oracle Cloud offering. The new suite of services already numbers more than 100 available applications, and Oracle has made a set of new APIs available for developers to build even more services on top of it. The rest of this slide show goes into more detail about all the content included in the Oracle Cloud.

Oracle’s take on the enterprise cloud is a bit different from that of most of its competitors, in that each user will be given a virtual machine instance in the cloud to use for whatever service the customer needs. As more compute power is needed, more is made available on an immediate basis. The pricing on this is still a bit murky. It’s not clear whether users will be charged per virtual machine per month or per service per month. There are still some questions that need to be answered, and Oracle did not address those on June 6.

If you can navigate a browser and you work for an enterprise, you can use the Oracle Cloud. Services will be made available, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said, on any type of device: desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile phone. At this point, just Apple iOS devices are hooked up. Android devices are expected later this year.

These include the heavy-duty Oracle database in the form of a secure cloud service, available via monthly subscription. Other Oracle Cloud Platform Services will include Java services for Oracle WebLogic; Web services to build Web applications rapidly using PHP, Ruby and Python; mobile services to allow developers to build cross-platform native and HTML5 mobile applications for smartphones and tablets; and analytics services to allow business users to build and share analytic dashboards and reports through the cloud.

Application services in the Oracle Cloud will include standards such as ERP, HCM (human capital management), talent management, sales and marketing, and customer experience. Oracle also has been stockpiling business applications over the years for on-premises, server-based deployments, including Seibel Systems, JD Edwards, Hyperion and PeopleSoft. In the last year or so, however, the company has picked up cloud-ready acquisitions such as Taleo (for its HCM), RightNow (CRM) and Endeca (data management) to fortify its cloud portfolio.

Enterprises will use Oracle Cloud Social Network to engage with their customers about social marketing, commerce, service and listening. It also will include social data services to aggregate data from social networks and enterprise data sources to enrich business applications, social marketing and engagement services, and social intelligence services to enable marketers to analyze social media interactions.

The latest version of the frontline Oracle Database, naturally, will serve as the foundation for all data and services. “We got a good price on it,” Ellison joked.

Oracle Cloud is built on a pay-for-what-you-use and pay-as-you-go cloud scheme, similar to Amazon’s Simple Storage and Elastic Compute Cloud. “In a lot of ways, we’ll be very similar to what Amazon is doing, only we’re refining and adding to it quite a lot,” Ellison said.

Oracle’s data center hardware and software is open-standards based (although the company’s database and some middleware was notorious in the past for vendor lock-in licensing limitations), and the Oracle Cloud will be no different, Ellison said.

Oracle has data centers “all over the world,” co-president Mark Hurd (center, with co-president Safra Catz) said, as well as 24/7 service help teams in distributed geographic locations. Oracle will have redundancies built in everywhere, as well as no single points of failure. “We don’t ever expect our cloud services to go down, but occasionally a server or something will crash, in which case we will be there with you within minutes—minutes, not hours or days—to help fix the situation,” Ellison said.