As Oracle stresses an all-encompassing cloud it is plunging into the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market with six different services for customers, the company said Monday, with its Database 12c at the core of its cloud environment.
The Oracle Cloud Platform PaaS releases, announced at its OpenWorld 2014 conference in San Francisco, cover everything from big data to mobile apps for developers.
Its PaaS components start with Oracle Big Data Cloud, which uses Hadoop to analyse and process vast swathes of data, then a Mobile Cloud that supports the creation of mobile apps with a cloud-based back end infrastructure. Oracle also revealed its Oracle Analytics Cloud service, which offers business intelligence, big data analytics, and embedded SaaS analytics. Though it is deployed in the cloud, it can crunch data on-premise and in the cloud, and can tackle both structured and unstructured data, said Oracle.
Its Integration Cloud enables customers to rapidly design, deploy and manage cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-on-premise integrations via a browser-based interface.
While it is not clear when all these will be made available, Oracle has now released the core elements of its PaaS cloud, meaning its database cloud and database backup cloud are now live. These are the centrepieces of the new platform, and support any Oracle Database application. They form part of the ‘click a button’ theory that promises customers the ability to switch from on-premise to cloud and back nearly instantly.
Co-CEO Mark Hurd said the PaaS offering will supplement Oracle’s SaaS play, which Oracle says saw 2,181 new cloud customers in the last 12 months and 725 new Fusion SaaS customers, as the firm tries to be an all-in-one cloud provider of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. He argued the cloud is the best place to test and build applications, which you can transport to the cloud from any Oracle database – not just Database 12c, the latest iteration.
"The reality is this whole movement of PaaS has the ability for us to move those workloads back and forth," he said. "If you look at the enterprise firms, 25-30% of their money goes on developing applications and testing, 40% on production, 25-30% on backup
"If you’re a CIO, and you have a production PaaS and it goes down, I need those applications running real time. You leave yourself exposed to the CFO, the CMO. In the test [PaaS] I have exposure to no-one except myself. It’s the IT organisation buiilding those applictaons. Therefore those workloads are very attractive to move to the cloud."
Customers can also use Oracle’s Java SE cloud tools to transport Java apps back and forth between on-premise and cloud and finally, a Node.js cloud to quickly deploy JavaScript apps.
CTO Larry Ellison claimed in his Sunday night keynote that Oracle is now the only cloud vendor that provides its own development platform for developers to use to build their own applications.
He said: "Believe it or not, we are the only cloud vendor on planet Earth that allows you to use the platform we develop on for you to extend our SaaS applications on. When you want to make an extension, you can use the same cloud platform our developers used to build core HCM in the first place.
"When you say well of course you do, nothing else makes sense, well I agree with you. Nothing else makes sense. But no-one else offers their cloud platform."
Its Messaging Cloud, designed to make communication between software components easy and reliable, is also live, as is its Business Intelligence Cloud, letting users make visual data dashboards for web browsers and mobile devices, and its developer cloud – giving developers a hosted development platform with application lifecycle management.
Thomas Kurian, executive VP of product development, said in a statement: "Today’s cloud computing technologies have the potential to open up a wealth of business opportunities, but to truly embrace the benefits the cloud offers, there needs to be a robust supporting platform in place.
Oracle is now looking for partners to help implement cloud implementation.
