Oracle

Overview

In September 2008, Larry Ellison said, "The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements." Before finishing, he pulled back a little and said they wouldn't fight the hype and would "make cloud computing announcements."

Fast-forward to April 2009 when Oracle said it was going to buy Sun Microsystems. This time Larry Ellison made it clear: "Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system -– applications to disk -– where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves." Sun certainly has important assets to bring to the game, as well as, the Sun Cloud and it was as if, in part, Oracle clearly planned to strengthen their cloud computing hand with the acquisition.

Over time, Oracle has steadily built their cloud strategy around existing products and services, along with choice acquisitions to fill in the gaps -- it's something they continue to evolve. Essentially, their strategy focuses on delivering Software as a Service (SaaS) to end-user customers and independent software vendors (ISVs). Oracle On Demand represents their suite of SaaS business applications. While, for ISVs, they offer the Oracle Platform for SaaS, a fully-integrated development and deployment environment for cloud-based services.

At the same time, Oracle is positioning itself as an enabler of cloud computing technology for developers of all stripes, whether within enterprises, ISVs or service providers. They don't want to directly provide platform or infrastructure services, but rather help other cloud vendors do just that. They also provide the choice of running their solutions in both public and private clouds and they've got you covered if you're looking to deploy Oracle applications or technologies via Amazon Web Services (or another public cloud).

Value Proposition

Oracle On Demand "helps customers achieve 30% - 80% lower total cost of ownership, benefit from a predictable cost model, and reduce risk." The Oracle Platform for SaaS helps developers to "deliver highly available, always-on services and scale out as their customer base grows."

Oracle Platform for SaaS provides enabling technology to developers of cloud services. It gives users an integrated platform for the development and deployment of both on-premise and public clouds. This helps reduce time-to-market, while ensuring scalability and availability of resources.

Products & Services

• Oracle On Demand offers a set of solutions covering applications, middleware, and database. It's one of "the broadest portfolio of subscription and managed applications" any provider has in the market. Oracle On Demand includes
  • Oracle CRM On Demand and Oracle E-Business Suite On Demand
  • Oracle Beehive On Demand for collaboration
  • Oracle Sourcing On Demand for online sourcing and supplier management
  • other industry solutions such as On Demand for Healthcare and Government, plus On Demand solutions tailored for small and medium-sized businesses.
• Oracle Platform for SaaS is a single, integrated platform that enables developers "to build, deploy and manage SaaS and cloud-based applications." The platform draws on core technologies across Oracle's database, middleware, application management, and virtualization stack. In this way, Oracle enables PaaS and SaaS vendors to build their own offerings using their technology.
• Oracle SaaS Program provides technology and business support to ISVs, hosting service providers, and system integrators to help them build, deploy, and manage SaaS offerings.
• Oracle Grid Computing provides a cost-effective, highly-scalable and available software infrastructure for both public and private clouds. It's also the basis for the Oracle Platform for SaaS.
• Oracle Cloud Computing Center is a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) where customers can deploy Oracle software via Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and/or backup Oracle database via Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).