From its first stirrings, cloud computing has been associated mostly with online applications. Now comes a more esoteric area of the cloud, one that's not as mainstream as software as a service (SaaS) but could have greater impact on business strategy—from the bottom up.
Known as platform as a service (PaaS), this is bits and bytes, tools and techniques stuff that will give the cloud its true enterprise computing bona fides.
Earlier this week Larry Ellison, Oracle executive chairman and CTO, enumerated a list of new PaaS offerings meant to fill in the company’s cloud services strategy. The list not only confirms that Oracle is as “all in” with the cloud as any Cleveland Cavaliers fan is with the prodigal LeBron James (still). The services also add up to a set of powerful tools that just might quell any lingering doubts about moving sizable chunks of IT operations to the cloud.
Ellison detailed more than 24 tools as services that support data management, data analytics, application development, mobile computing, collaboration, business processes, even the Internet of Things. They include big data services, enterprise management services, and services in the form of the company’s highest-performing database engineered system.
Ellison also talked about the company’s new offerings in infrastructure as a service (IaaS), the third leg of the cloud stool and one that’s also growing in importance, led by Amazon Web Services. IaaS encompasses server cycles, network bandwidth, and storage capacity—accessed and licensed online.
IaaS is mostly a commodity play, yet even it is made more enterprise-appropriate by Oracle’s value-adds, like automatic provisioning and patching, as well as its new high-speed, high-capacity data transfer and archive service
Not that Oracle won’t rise to a commodity challenge. “When we’re in a commodity business we know we have to compete on price and we’re prepared to do that,” Ellison said. As for reliability and performance, Oracle’s cloud is well established, he pointed out, racking up 33 billion transactions a day.
Brave New Cloud World
“It’s a new world,” Ellison told an audience of customers, analysts, and reporters at Oracle’s Redwood City, Calif., headquarters. That new world includes new competitors, such as Salesforce.com, Workday, and Amazon. But none offers Oracle’s breadth and depth of cloud services, in particular in terms of PaaS. “Our competitors tend to be highly specialized,” he said. And no competitor, with the possible exception of old foe Microsoft, offers the same technology to customers both on-premises and in the cloud, he noted.
Ellison emphasized several times that the technology the company offers in the cloud is “the same exact” technology it sells for on-premises use. That’s important as companies learn how to navigate the intersection of internal computing and external cloud resources, which is leading to what some industry analysts call “hybrid cloud” architectures and what Ellison referred to as the “coming decade of coexistence between on-premises data processing and cloud data processing.”
It’s a trend that calls for a technology environment that provides powerful functionality, seamless integration, and a holistic approach to collaborating and sharing resources. Technology like that will be as important to the agility and flexibility required by businesses in the cloud-based economy as their sales or supply chain applications—maybe more so.
Enter PaaS, specifically Oracle’s new PaaS tools and frameworks, which represent a wide array of functions and services that address much of that hoped-for capability. Oracle’s tools are based on industry standards, incorporate Oracle’s years of enterprise experience, and support modern application requirements such as social and mobile features. “We’re the only ones that can do this,” Ellison said.
PaaS Gains New Importance
Already, Oracle’s PaaS sales are growing fast—a significant contributor to the company’s impressive cloud numbers in its most recent financial report. In Q3 FY2015, Oracle had 400 new customers for its PaaS and IaaS offerings; in Q4 FY2015 it had almost 1,500. “I’ve never seen anything like it, not even in the early days of Oracle,” Ellison said.
Now Oracle has transitioned its most compelling database and development tools, frameworks, and platforms to online services—a noteworthy accomplishment. “This is a really big deal,” Ellison said.
What this could mean for Oracle customers—and by extension, corporate computing overall—is a brave new world of integrated on-premises and cloud functions and resources. “You can take virtually all of your applications out of your data center and move them to the Oracle Cloud,” Ellison asserted. “Not just Oracle applications, not just Oracle databases, not just Java applications, but all of your applications, third-party applications, custom applications—everything can be moved from your data center to the Oracle Cloud easily, with the push of a button.”
Ellison didn’t downplay its significance for the company. PaaS “is a relatively new business for us,” he said, adding “it’s an incredibly important business for us. It will probably be our most important. In fact, it will be our most important business going forward.”
Find out more about the Oracle Cloud Platform on Oracle.com:
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Statements in this article relating to Oracle’s future plans, expectations, beliefs, intentions, and prospects are “forward-looking statements” and are subject to material risks and uncertainties. Many factors could affect Oracle’s current expectations and Oracle’s actual results, and could cause actual results to differ materially. A detailed discussion of such factors and other risks that affect Oracle’s business is contained in Oracle’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, including Oracle’s most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q, particularly under the heading “Risk Factors.” Copies of these filings are available online from the SEC, by contacting Oracle’s Investor Relations Department at (650) 506-4073 or by clicking on SEC Filings on Oracle’s Investor Relations website at http://www.oracle.com/investor. All information set forth in this article is current as of June 24, 2015. Oracle undertakes no duty to update any statement in light of new information or future events.
