Oracle pitches at a major share of cloud

It would be easy to dismiss the pre-Christmas announcement by Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison, of a significant move into the cloud market as both an infrastructure/platform service provider and as a SaaS-based applications services provider as just another attempt by an established major software and systems vendor to play cloud `me-too’ card. And if this was just a case of a vendor defending its technology against the new and unknown the move would probably justify the response: “yes…..and….?”

But because the `new and unknown’ in question is cloud delivery, and because Oracle is one of the biggest of very big players in the business data management and applications field, as well as now a real player in the big systems hardware race, it has to be taken more seriously. It has a huge, established marketplace of user businesses that represents a significant potential demand for cloud-delivered services.

Though its image amongst users has not always been of the best, the fact that its applications can now start being delivered as SaaS may prove to be a sufficient lever to attract new customers to the fold, if only because they may perceive they can keep the company a little more at arm’s length. Oracle also has a large channel partner community which could use the availability of SaaS to springboard themselves into offering cloud services.

Last, and perhaps most important, Cloud services is very much about the `service’ rather than the technology used to create, run or deliver it. Whatever some of its customers might say about the company, it has to be acknowledged that Oracle did not get to its present status by having databases and applications that did not work. It has a long and significant track record of delivering business solutions to customers. Making that available via cloud is an obvious move – and one which Oracle probably has the technical and financial resources to make stick with customers both old and new.

Ellison’s plan is a three-pronged attack on the marketplace, aimed directly the likes of Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft and Salesforce. The three are the provision of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and applications in whatever form the user requires, from on-premise or hosted Private clouds through to Software as a Service (SaaS).

On the IaaS front the company not only has datacentre resources available but also, of course, both the hardware and applications/database systems needed to provide users with any type of infrastructure they might require. This can range from the traditional on-premise environment through to hosted Private clouds running large, dedicated bare metal systems such as its humongous ExaByte servers.

From this it can extend into the platform market, adding the applications and supporting tools, including the development environments and tools. It also offers a certain degree of self-fulfilling potential in this sector, as it is one of the biggest business solutions providers with an extensive installed base. If only a few percent of those users start making moves into the cloud as a platform for future development, it will still amount to a healthy business. That, in turn, could easily attract many supporting applications and services players to be partners in such a platform venture.

Oracle already has an app-store model in place for marketing and selling both its own and partner applications and services.

The move to the Oracle platform would also be easier for potential partners than they might imagine. Though much of Oracle’s key marketing messages on cloud services focus on `Oracle specificity’- implying that it is, in some way, `different’ from cloud services and that existing Oracle users have little option but to buy Oracle-specific cloud services – the company has in the past quietly admitted that it is all `standard technology’. That means partners that have already engineered their tools and services for other cloud partners will have little re-engineering overhead to fund. And opting for Oracle as a good bet to start any move into the cloud will then open up other market opportunities.   

The partner channel would also be a major contributor to selling Oracle as SaaS, for they would be the traditional first port of call for both narrow, vertical market sectors where specialist knowledge counts for much, and for the bulk of the SMB community. Here, the ability to have Oracle’s industrial strength applications underpinning their business, for a sensible price, could prove to be a major lever on SMBs’ thinking towards cloud services.

It is fair to observe, of course, that Oracle is lagging behind major competitors such as Microsoft and IBM in staking out a multi-pronged service provision option. Both of those rivals can certainly compete with Oracle for customer mindshare on the basis of database systems and applications which lie at the heart of many-a corporate IT infrastructure.

But it would be foolish to assume that means the company cannot pick up speed on it quite quickly. It is still early adopter days in cloud computing, and the majority of businesses remain at the cloud contemplation stage. The arguments that are, increasingly, most likely to attract them are the availability of a comprehensive range of service options based on applications with a proven track record of success in helping businesses run themselves. That is a marketing message which could easily be used by Oracle over the coming months.