Tuesday 12 October 2010

Oracle Gets Cloud Religion

What a difference a year makes. Last September, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison  launched into a tirade about the "nonsense" that cloud computing had become. The  industry had gone haywire, he said, and slapped the buzzword on technologies  that weren't really new at all.
What a difference a year makes. Last September, Oracle (ORCL) CEO Larry  Ellison launched into a
tirade about the "nonsense" that cloud computing had become
. The industry  had gone haywire, he said, and slapped the buzzword on technologies that weren't  really new at all.
Fast-forward to Oracle OpenWorld this week and Oracle is now well and truly  on the cloud bandwagon. You can hardly walk down a hallway at the Moscone  Center, where the show is being held, without bumping into a banner emblazoned  with "cloud."

In a keynote Tuesday, Executive Vice President of Product Development Thomas  Kurian declared Oracle is in the best position to provide cloud computing  products and services, thanks to its comprehensive lineup of hardware,  applications, security and management technologies.

Data centers shouldn't be based on multiple "small  building blocks" because they're too hard to manage, Kurian said. A smarter  approach is embodied by Oracle's newly announced Exalogic machine, a high-powered "cloud in a box" that combines hardware, storage and middleware to
run any kind of application at vast scale, he said.


"You get a single environment and single architecture to manage your data center," Kurian said.


He also demonstrated how Oracle's management software can "manage the entire cloud, all the way from applications down to the disk," giving administrators insight into KPIs (key performance indicators) as well as the status of servers and throughput. "Both are critical when you move to cloud," he said.


Kurian also addressed Oracle's formula for security in the cloud, touting its offerings in database-level security and identity management.
He discussed how users will be able to easily configure and tweak business processes in Oracle's upcoming Fusion Applications,


"In the past you had to call in a developer to do that. We have re-architected our middleware to change how you do this in a fundamental way," he said.


It made sense for Kurian to stress Oracle's capabilities in security and identity management, as they are not things that most pure-play SaaS (software-as-a-service) vendors can offer as of yet, said 451 Group analyst China Martens.
Oracle's cloud computing strategy doesn't appear to include a public IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) offering like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Nor did Kurian stress concepts such as multitenancy, a SaaS architecture that lets many customers access a single instance of an application, with their data kept separate.



http://www.cio.com/article/617263/Oracle_Gets_Cloud_Religion?source=rss_cloud_computing
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