iT Rumors

Oracle is offering a series of new services that position it as a one-stop shop for all things cloud and directly target the likes of Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com.

While Oracle had already offered SaaS (software-as-a-service) applications, database-as-a-service and other products, it announced 10 additional cloud services at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

They include Compute Cloud and Object Storage Cloud, both of which seem aimed at similar services from AWS. Oracle termed its own offerings as secure, "enterprise-grade" and "fully configurable." The services are currently in preview, according to Oracle's cloud services website.

Oracle also announced a new managed Database Cloud service that gives customers control over a dedicated instance of its database.

"We back it up nightly, we give you point-in-time recovery, we upgrade the software for it and we can also tune it for you if you need us to do so," Executive Vice President of Product Development Thomas Kurian said during a keynote address at OpenWorld on Tuesday.

Oracle is apparently offering the new database service in three tiers: Basic, Managed and Premium Managed. All three options were listed as being in preview stage on Tuesday.

That verbiage suggests Oracle wants to give customers the option of a higher-touch, and likely more expensive experience than they'd get from simply paying as they go for raw database capacity from the likes of AWS and Oracle itself.

Oracle also announced a Java Cloud that delivers clusters of Weblogic Server along with "full administrative control"; a BI (business intelligence) cloud that provides self-service tools for uploading data and generating dashboards; Documents Cloud, for file sharing and collaboration; Mobile Cloud, which includes tools for building secure mobile applications; and a database backup service. The latter three are also in preview mode.

In addition, Oracle announced a Billing and Revenue Management cloud service for companies that depend on subscription billing. This offering will directly compete with thelikes of Zuora.

Finally, in a nod to Salesforce.com's AppExchange, Oracle is rolling out Cloud Marketplace, a site where partners can list applications that integrate with Oracle's own and customers can shop around.

Oracle apparently wants to present itself to customers as a company that can meet all of their cloud-related needs.

There's a benefit to this approach, said Senior Vice President of Applications Development Chris Leone, during a presentation earlier in the week.

Most companies have taken a "very tactical" approach to adopting cloud services, Leone said. But then they end up dealing with "four, five, six vendors, all with different [service-level agreements]," and IT departments end up with the unwieldy task of managing these relationships, he said.

"What we've seen is customers say, how can I consolidate my cloud mess and bring this all together," Leone said. "We have the full breadth, so you can start to think about that."

When Oracle denotes a service as being in preview, it means that between 20 and 100 customers are using it in sort of a beta program, Kurian said during a press conference Tuesday. All of them are expected to be generally available in the first half of 2014, he added.

Of particular interest to some may be how much Oracle charges for its object storage and compute services, given the continuous downward pricing pressure in that market. While declining to give specifics, Kurian said Oracle plans to be price-competitive.

Source : PCWorld

Oracle has hyped its new 12c database as faster and more powerful than ones that have come before, and now it’s highlighting the release’s ability to easily serve up multiple databases of varying size and scope according to a particular user’s needs.

Many Oracle customers are excited about 12c, and for a particular reason, said Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of database server technologies, during a keynote Monday at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

“Customers are telling us they want to go to database-as-a-service, on-premise,” he said.

Version 12c, which became generally available in June, includes an already well-publicized feature called “pluggable” databases, where many discrete databases sit inside a single container database, an approach that Oracle says can radically reduce operational overhead.

Mendelsohn described a scenario in which an IT department could offer end users a menu of database options.

A bronze tier would be for simple backups of less important databases, while a silver level would add in Oracle’s Data Guard for additional security. A top-level gold tier could include Real Application Clusters along with Data Guard. Users would also choose from standard database sizes from the menu.

Mendelsohn and another Oracle employee demonstrated a new self-service provisioning tool that is being released along with 12c.

“In a couple seconds you’re up and running,” Mendelsohn said, as the demo showed the selection of a database was possible with a few clicks. “Pretty amazing, right?”

Meanwhile, databases could also be easily “unplugged” from various tiers and moved to others as priorities change, Mendelsohn added.

The pluggable database architecture also offers a new take on multitenancy, a feature used in SaaS (software-as-a-service). Rather than have all customers share a single application instance, they would each get a pluggable database, Mendelsohn said.

“This huge barrier of entry for people to become SaaS providers is all gone,” he added.

That said, Oracle’s technology stack has already served as a foundation for many SaaS vendors, and presumably Oracle will look to move them all onto the latest releases, including Database 12c.

One such vendor is Salesforce.com, which recently announced it would commit long term to Oracle technologies. The pact also publicly buried the hatchet between Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.

Elsewhere in his keynote, Mendelsohn provided further details on the Oracle Database Backup Logging Recovery Appliance, which was unveiled briefly by Ellison on Sunday.

The appliance, which is due out “sometime next year,” can scale out to petabytes of data, he said. It differs from and improves on past backup products, allowing users to restore a system back to any point in time they choose.

Oracle also announced a cloud-based backup service as well as the ability to replicate their Database Backup Logging Recovery Appliance to Oracle’s cloud.

Mendelsohn didn’t touch upon Oracle’s public cloud database-as-a-service, which was announced in 2011. Ellison is expected to discuss that offering as well as other Oracle public cloud services during a Tuesday keynote at OpenWorld.

Nor did Mendelsohn speak at length about an upcoming in-memory option for the Oracle database, which Ellison also announced Sunday.

That option is now in “pre-beta stage” in Mendelsohn’s development group, and will be coming out next year, he said.

Oracle is hoping the in-memory option will help it fend off interest in competing in-memory databases, such as SAP’s HANA. SAP is hoping that its customers who now use Oracle to run SAP applications will switch to HANA.

Oracle’s database architecture is “bloated” compared to HANA and the in-memory option could mean more work for database administrators, SAP said in an emailed statement.

In addition, “while Oracle was working on 12c, SAP HANA matured from a database to a platform to perform application functions close to the database—e.g. predictive libraries, business functions, graph processing, geo spatial processing, text processing engines and app server capabilities in memory,” SAP said. “We are ready for the next generation apps that will need these application management capabilities natively in database. We believe that they are really behind on this.”

While Mendelsohn spoke repeatedly about strong early interest in 12c, typically most Oracle database customers wait quite some time to upgrade, in the interest of letting others work out any remaining bugs.

There are other considerations as well, said John Matelski, CIO of DeKalb County, Georgia, in an interview.

“With a lot of the security enhancements and multitenancy, there’s a lot of excitement about [12c],” said Matelski, who is also vice president of the Independent Oracle Users Group. “But organizationally you can’t just make a leap. We have a good number of folks that have started the planning phases, but even the planning phase takes six to nine months.”

Other factors are somewhat out of Oracle’s hands, namely how long it takes for third-party application vendors to certify their products for a new release, Matelski added. Until that happens, “we know we’ll get support from Oracle but you don’t know you’re going to get the support from other vendors,” he said.

Source : PCWorld