Ellison: Oracle Will Deliver World’s ‘most Comprehensive Cloud’ - henrickshielturry

Oracle Chief operating officer Larry Ellison declared the company is in order to offering "the most comprehensive mottle on the planet Earth," during a webcast event on Wed.

"It's been a lengthened clock time coming," Ellison aforementioned of the Oracle Public Cloud, which encompasses Oracle's suite of Fusion Applications delivered as both SaaS (software as a service) and PaaS (platform as a servicing) features, including the Java Cloud Service and Database Cloud Servicing. IT's also the home of Oracle Social Network, the company's raid Facebook-like coaction tools for enterprises.

Most of the details discussed Wednesday were well-telegraphed, given that Oracle National Cloud was first announced at the OpenWorld league in October and the company had set up a website filled with specifics, save for details such American Samoa pricing and general-availability dates.

The applications bequeath feature per-user, per-calendar month pricing, Ellison said. But it still wasn't clear by the end of the presentation whether all the components are broadly available now.

Meanwhile, Ellison's proclamation of Prophesier's newfound cloud art on Wednesday stood in stark dividing line to his past mockery of cloud computing as hype-filled "gibberish" practical improperly to longstanding technologies. Such jibes were nowhere to be found Wednesday as the CEO spun a broad strategic vision.

"We made a decision to rebuild every of our applications for the cloud almost vii years ago," Ellison said of Fusion Applications, which are also available happening-premises. "IT took seven years of work, thousands of people, billions of dollars, to make the transition from being an along-premise application supplier to being a cloud application provider, as well as an connected-premise provider."

Oracle is hoping these attributes will have extraordinary allurement for customers, since they'll atomic number 4 capable to choose either deployment model and move applications between them.

Oracle is set to offer 100 different cloud applications, spanning ERP (endeavour imagination planning), CRM (client relationship direction), HCM (manlike capital management) and other software categories, Ellison said.

Wednesday's event also provided Ellison with an chance to tout what he called Oracle Public Cloud's many advantages over rivals such as Cosh and Salesforce.com, as well as to engage in several of his orthodox competitive trash talk.

One major reward that Oracle Public Cloud provides is major certificate for customers, according to Ellison.

"We have identical comprehensive, small-grained security in our system," he said. The Central Intelligence Representation was Oracle's number one customer, and security "has been very, very wakeless in our culture for a years," he said.

"Your database is not commingled with other customers' data," Ellison added. "Information technology's a big difference between our cloud and others connected the market." Customers also get their own virtual machine, "so you are snug," Ellison said. "Modern virtual technology is how we offer safety."

Ellison has criticized the practice of multitenancy, a software architecture common in cloud services where a number of customers share a single application illustration.

Multitenancy has long-wooled been cited arsenic an advantage for cloud companies, since they can acclivity some customers at once, lowering costs, but Ellison turned that argument on its head.

"We guess a modern cloud lets you decide when you want to upgrade, non have the cloud seller tell you when you have to upgrade," helium said. "We call up that's a identical big shot. We'll allow you, within reason, to decide when to rise." Customers will grow about a one-twelvemonth window to fix when an available upgrade is right field for them, Ralph Waldo Ellison said.

Approximately customers may have questions about how often upgrades to Fusion Applications will actually be available, given that Oracle had been criticized for years over the delays in delivering the initial entourage. But on Wednesday, Ellison pictured the project's timeline arsenic something necessary and vital.

"If there's one point I would like to make this afternoon, it's how hardened it was, how long it took, how many multitude were involved, how practically it cost," atomic number 2 same.

In contrast, rival Blackjack won't have anything "for real" in the cloud until 2022, Ellison claimed. "I assume't think they'll make it. Our applications will have octet years of maturing. 2022. Excellent vision. 2022. Neat news program. 2022. Terrible year to get to the cloud."

"All SAP's got is SuccessFactors," he said, referring to the cloud HCM (human uppercase management) vender that SAP recently acquired. "I don't think that's enough." Oracle has made cloud acquisitions of its possess in the imprint of Taleo, RightNow and Vitrue.

Those remarks drew a hasty response from SAP on Wednesday.

"As usual, you stool tell who Oracle is most disquieted about by the competitors they criticize most," the company said in an emailed statement. "Building a profitable cloud over business depends along scale — with 17 million users, SAP's SuccessFactors business has the largest user base of any cloud apps supplier." Play out is also offering a "complete ERP suite for the cloud today" in the form of Business ByDesign, and has galore other "broadly coupled" cloud applications, the companionship added.

However, Ellison may have been referring to the fact that SAP's flagship happening-premises ERP software, Business Suite, isn't yet rewritten for the cloud and may non exist for some time. ByDesign is aimed at smaller companies and divisions of larger ones.

Meanwhile, another plus for Oracle's overcast is the fact information technology is founded entirely on industry standards, different the competition, Ellison said.

"Information technology's very simplified to take our cloud applications and exsert them and integrate them with applications you have running on-premises," he said.

What Ellison didn't order is that many would-comprise Fusion Applications customers bequeath choose the corrupt deployment option referable the sizable technical hurdles involved in running them on-premises.

Oracle's cloud also provides customers with a range of social networking-related features, including the ability to collaborate with one another and to reach out to customers on common social sites such as Facebook. At one point, Ellison demonstrated how a merchandising professional could formulate and deploy a Network store on Facebook without the assistant of IT staff.

Finally, Oracle's cloud incorporates a senior core infrastructure, running non on farms of commodity hardware but on Oracle's Exadata and Exalogic database and coating server machines, which Vaticinator has heavily promoted for their tenor performance.

Exadata and Exalogic also provide high fault tolerance and high availability, Ellison aforesaid. "If a component fails, a disk drive fails, it doesn't matter."

Those systems and others are now existence offered with a new set of Platinum services offerings, which were also announced Wednesday during the event.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise computer software and general technology breakage news for The IDG News Service. Chris's e-mail handle is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com