The Oracle Cloud Worm Has Turned So Much That It's Doing Somersaults

Perhaps the favorite video of every cloud commentator starring Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison is from a few years ago when Ellison opined on the cloud. The video recorded back in 2009 when Ed Zander interviewed Ellison at the Churchill Club, saw an animated Ellison pour scorn on all the hype around cloud computing. Ellison went on to suggest that "cloud" was simply a marketing term of no real importance. The video is Ellison at its finest and worth a watch.

So to see Oracle now pepper the "cloud" word into every one of their press releases and product launches is a little jarring. Perhaps this cloud thing has legs after all.

Oracle is going a step further today and not only accepting the cloud, but also putting its seal of approval on a vendor that is not only "all in" on the cloud, but is also doing so via an open source project. Oracle is announcing its support for its flagship 12C database to run on only two distributions of the open source OpenStack platform: It's own, or that of OpenStack wunderkind Mirantis.

Mirantis is, of course, the pure-play OpenStack vendor that seems to have made all the right moves - while other vendors are falling by the wayside (either by way of acquisitions or through outright failure), Mirantis seems to go from strength to strength. Widely expected to be a future IPO candidate, Mirantis has amassed a significant investment war chest and holds the spot as the number one independent OpenStack vendor.

Under the terms of the partnership, being announced ahead of next week's OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, the two companies are collaborating to enable Oracle Solaris and Mirantis OpenStack users to accelerate application and database provisioning in private cloud environments via Murano. This effort brings Oracle Database 12c, and Oracle Multitenant deployed on Oracle Solaris to Murano—the first Oracle cloud-ready products to be available in the catalog. Murano is an official OpenStack project that was originally created by Mirantis engineers.

In terms of what Oracle Multitenant actually is, it was introduced with Oracle Database 12c and allows multiple pluggable databases to be supported within a single multitenant container database. Each pluggable database provides an isolated environment in which to run applications. The consolidated Container Databases represent a single environment for a cloud provider to support.

On the one hand, this is a big deal since Oracle databases are still a mission-critical requirement for many organizations (after all, the majority of SaaS vendors actually run on Oracle under the hood). On the other this is a pretty massive seal of approval from Oracle for Mirantis and will further give it ammunition to use when talking with prospective customers. Oracle's endorsement likely just raised the valuation on Mirantis' next funding round.