 "Larry Ellison takes on Amazon, Microsoft with Oracle's new cloud platforms")
Larry Ellison, executive chairman of the board and chief technology officer of Oracle had claimed earlier this year that Oracle’s cloud was ‘complete’. While he clarified that Oracle would continue to create and improve, Ellison insisted all the major pieces were in place.
Building on this, at Oracle OpenWorld 2015 Ellison announced two cloud platforms with a great emphasis on maintaining security at a time when private data is at the risk of being stolen via cyber attacks. Oracle further made an aggressive push for its diversified software solutions and integrated cloud platforms and launched a slew of innovative moves to take on its main cloud computing rivals Amazon and Microsoft. And in trademark Ellison style, he dismissed IBM and SAP saying they didn’t really have a cloud play.
While the new “Oracle SCM Cloud” will offer the first complete supply chain and discrete manufacturing with 100 percent fusion, the “E-commerce in the CX Cloud” platform will be a complete, integrated modern suite covering customers’ requirements across the spectrum, including marketing, sales, service and social responsibility.
“Oracle has committed to make its cloud and data platforms easy, performing, compelling and secure. We will lower costs and accelerate your power,” Ellison announced.
“We are building solutions that will take off your workload and give you better performance,” he added. In another significant move, Ellison announced a new mobile, consumer-like Cloud UI – a state of the art mobile user interface. “The Java-based mobile platform will always make you connected and able to work. It is a modern tablet and smartphone-friendly platform and will become the best choice among all other mobile platforms available today,” Ellison told the packed Moscone Centre in the heart of the city.
He also announced an integrated “Just-in-Time Learning System” that will be embedded in all Oracle SaaS applications to benefit customers. “So learn the app and learn the job,” he said. “We started building all our application on the cloud and for this, we had to rewrite our entire database. We had SaaS then. Once we had this, we found that now, we need PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service),” he said. “That helped us reach where we are today,” he said.
Ellison also announced the “Exadata Cloud Service” that will facilitate identical software and hardware on-premise. “Infrastructure has been a stunning change. We are today in every layer of the cloud. We have the largest enterprise-based cloud applications,” he claimed.
“We can’t automate everything. We can’t replace ourselves as users of the applications. But we need to make systems easier to use. We insist on real time security to stop data,” he said.
“By 2020, 50 percent of the global workforce will be tech-savvy millennials (those born after 1980). Companies worldwide need to go simpler, faster and more innovative to win their trust. And Oracle is delivering new features and innovations for them,” claimed Bob Evans, chief communication officer, Oracle, during a media interaction.
For the quarter ended August 31 this year, Oracle revenue for its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud solutions rose by 34 percent. “We have added 800 new PaaS customers and 612 SaaS customers in the quarter. Oracle also had 1,300 new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) cloud customers in the past 12 months,” Evans added.
With inputs from IANS
