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Where does Oracle fit into the Cloud Computing argument?
I could be wrong but it seems like Oracle is absent in all the cloud conversations everyone is having. Are they a player in the Cloud Computing fray?
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4 Answers
Oracle has a very disjointed cloud strategy, based around what appears to be three areas: IaaS, PaaS and Cloud Applications.
Oracle states that the "underpinning" (and they use that word a lot) of their cloud offerings is built on Exalogic and Exadata. This may have some interest to existing Oracle enterprise customers, but holds little or no interest for public cloud providers. Exalogic is a tightly coupled hardware stack with an Infiniband backplane, relying on that transport to connect to the Exadata database engine. Sitting on top of all that is a proprietary Fusion middleware stack that, according to Oracle has been "optimized" to take advantage of the underlying hardware architecture. Hmmm.... if I'm a public cloud provider looking for a highly scalable, elastic architecture that I can share among hundreds or thousands of customers, that stack doesn't sound very appealing. For large enterprise customers with applications tailored to that stack, it might be OK and if you close one eye and squint you might be able to see a cloud in there somewhere.
They also tout their presence in the cloud by making statements like "Salesforce.com builds its services on top of an Oracle database engine" and "Amazon.com is announcing RDMF as a relational database service, underpinned by Oracle database technologies". They also state that they are offering Oracle Fusion products as SaaS models, claiming that Oracle CRM is the second largest SaaS product in the market today. Again, hmmm...
In the pure IaaS arena, they are basically touting Sun Blade 6000 with Solaris, Oracle Linux and Oracle VM server with a ZFS storage appliance. On top of all that they position Solaris Cluster and Enterprise Manager Ops Center. Last time I checked, I didn't find a whole lot of public cloud providers offering this stack. If you're a traditional Sun shop you might be interested in this combination, but I don't believe most enterprises would look to this model as their IaaS stack of choice.
In the applications and development area, it's all about Fusion. Fusion is not a bad stack on top of which Oracle's legacy apps (financials, HCM, supply chain management, CRM, GRC, etc.) now sit. But again, it's a big stack strategy. They claim that they offer the best open standards platform (Java, XML, BPEL, identity management, etc). But at then end of the day, it's still an "enterprise application stack" - not for the faint of heart.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I just don't see an uptake on hardware-specific cloud stacks weighed down by heavyweight middleware and management systems. That's why not only Oracle, but Cisco, HP and IBM don't appear at the top of the list when people think about building public cloud services, or even private clouds for that matter. Maybe that's why initiatives like OpenStack are getting attention and gaining traction. Citrix and VMware may hold the upper hand by decoupling the "cloud" from the hardware. Throw ODMs selling directly to big enterprises and cloud service providers and the traditional hardware/software vendors may have some challenges ahead of them.
I concur with Robert.. Oracle is hanging on to a very profitable middleware stack that they've been building by way of acquisition and integration for almost a decade at this point. In some ways, the cloud is the very antithesis of what they are doing, and they're not really prepared to support it.
People often like to point out what the cloud will do to Microsoft's business and business model, but I think that Microsoft is far more prepared to utilize and sell cloud services than is Oracle. (Personally, even Oracle's Fusion strategy seems disjointed at times).
Oracle is not prepared for the cloud, and their licensing costs absolutely stink. If the many NoSQL database management systems get robust enough in the next 9-18 months, we're going to see many more people bypass Oracle at the DB level for huge scale web applications, and we'll see many smaller companies (who are already embracing cloud computing) use other ERP and CRM apps than Oracle's.
Lucky for Oracle, on-premise solutions -- and the company's that desire them -- won't be going away overnight...
I'm with you guys - Oracle makes gazillions selling the middleware that runs much of the web, given that fact, Cloud adoption is a great thing for them. True they don't have a strong outwardly facing Cloud story and I'm sure they'll gain this going forwards (probably by acquisition). But this isn't because they have to, rather because Ellison's ego won't let him be seen as anything but a leader in this brave new world...
Robert and Andrew cover this question in detail. I will just add that at SIIA / Opsource All About the Cloud, Microsoft's Matt Thompson noted that Larry Ellison specifically stated to Sun employees that Larry didn't believe in Cloud. So I suppose that's something. Personally I'm not a purist in terms of the technology stack. While Oracle's stack may be proprietary I think some of the ideas Oracle brings to Exadata highlight what I consider a repressive and authoritarian aspect in the attempt to build committees and standards organizations to define Cloud technology. As long as customers want it and Clouds provide it I'm not really concerned over the software or hardware or network that comprises the stack. Oracle's selection of Infiniband is an example. In the Cloud TCP / IP may not be the best transport. Many of the technology standards of the internet, such as TCP/IP are a poor match for high speed reliable internal datacenter / cloud networks. Inside the Cloud if the hypervisor by virtue of the ability to abstract the hardware layer, why not choose the best and most suitable technology for the Cloud. I don't argue Oracle will be the chosen vendor, yet Oracle has highlighted some of the possible (and dramatic) performance and scalability rewards achievable through an end-to-end view of applications and a willingness to cast away TCP/IP or any other inherited form or standard no longer suited for the needs of business in the Cloud.
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