Oracle was expected to make a major cloud announcement last night. In the event, the core of the announcement was that it now has 100-odd cloud applications on the Oracle Public Cloud (see Oracle finally gets the cloud), has a social platform offering, and it laid out the bones of its PaaS offering. But it was not the sweeping strategic overview that was expected and although we believe the announcement was to announce the general availability of the Oracle Public Cloud that was not explicitly stated.
We’ll review the announcement in more detail but at the top level CEO Larry Ellison reiterated that the company has spent billions of dollars and seven years pulling its cloud platform together and populating it with applications. The applications comprise the long awaited Fusion applications plus its band of acquired cloud assets such as RightNow, Taleo, Vitrue, and (acquisition pending) Collective Intellect (see the HotViews archive for the detail). And we expect to see many more cloud acquisitions.
Cloud Platform Services provide database, (application and web site) development, document management and analytics capabilities. Cloud Social Services cover enterprise collaboration and include social network data aggregation functionality, social marketing and engagement, and social analytics. Everything will run on Oracle’s Exadata database and Exalogic middleware appliances (so Oracle is making use of its ‘engineered together’ resources).
What was missing from the announcement was the detail about how these various offerings have been brought together. Ellison talked about the Oracle offering avoiding the data and business process fragmentation that arises when using multiple public clouds but did not give any insight into what Oracle has done to achieve this. It appears to have a very broad cloud portfolio and uses standards-based technology, which is all well and good, but has Oracle stitched data and processes together across the cloud assets or is that left to customers? To what extent has it integrated the cloud assets? How much do the services cost? And are they generally available, including in the UK? These were fundamental questions that were not addressed. Nevertheless, Oracle has a formidable set of cloud assets, now it is down to execution. SAP and Microsoft need to pay attention and advance their own cloud execution strategies.