Cloud Hosting

Summary: CEO Larry Ellison has unveiled an ambitious cloud strategy built around an all-Oracle IT stack, but has failed to give evidence at Oracle Open World of performance or cost advantages over rivals.

Oracle wants to build a cathedral of cloud services, while all around it its competitors are building slums.

The company's chief executive, Larry Ellison, outlined the database giant's cloud strategyon Sunday at Oracle OpenWorld. His vision was that Oracle customers will use both a public and private cloud entirely based around the company's software and hardware.

"We're adding a new line of business, cloud computing, to our traditional business of selling software and selling hardware... and we're going to sell it on the fastest computers in the world," Ellison said on Sunday. "It makes a lot of sense for Oracle to be in all three tiers of cloud services."

Those three tiers are software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). In other words, Oracle wants to be the Salesforce, Heroku, and Google, Microsoft, Amazon and HP of the cloud.

"The infrastructure that we're offering isn't conventional infrastructure," Ellison said. "What we're offering is our OS, our VM, compute services and storage services on the fastest, most reliable machines in the world on our engineered systems all networked together with a modern Infiniband network."

In other words, Oracle's cloud is one that is built with its overarching 'software and hardware, engineered together' philosophy.

Different approach

The approach differs markedly from that of Oracle's competitors: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is known to use vast amounts of low-cost commodity servers to run its cloud, while Google has gone as far as to design and build its own stripped-down servers. Neither of these companies sell on-premise hardware.

HP, which via its significant hardware business is perhaps the closest company to Oracle in terms of form, has opted for a more open cloud strategy. Though the IT giant sells cloud-specific hardware, it uses the open-source OpenStack cloud software for its own cloud effort.

Visit link:
Oracle sets sights on an all-Oracle cloud