At the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco Sunday, Oracle revealed details about its upgraded cloud platform, saying it will be priced similarly with what Amazon and other infrastructure service providers are offering.
Chairman and chief technology officer Larry Ellison talked about the company's newest cloud products, which include tools for integrating social, analytics, identity, and mobile features into software, noting that Oracle in the cloud makes it possible to move any database from any data center to the cloud as easy as pushing a button.
With cloud-computing products, Oracle is actually stepping away from what it is used to. The company adheres to a business model that makes it money off of selling hardware and software to customers running and managing their own data centers.
By switching to web-based products and services, Oracle is looking to do the running and managing for customers, raising efficiency since it will be handling everything itself. This will also help stem losses incurred as customers move away from buying to simply subscribing.
"As the movement to the cloud grows, we expect this transition will affect our revenue to the positive. These customers will essentially replace their software-support payments with a cloud subscription, which will mean substantially more revenue to Oracle, " said co-CEO Safra Catz.
Reported profits and sales for the fiscal quarter that ended in August saw Oracle sales jumping 2.7 percent as new software dropped 2 percent and cloud-computing divisions recording double-digit growth.
Oracle's cloud platform features software-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, and platform-as-a-service, all of which are needed to better serve the needs of customers. The company has been swiftly migrating applications and databases without making the customer come up with a single line of code for more than 30 years now and Oracle is not about to change that.
Oracle has been heavily criticized for not moving into cloud-computing technologies fast enough, but Ellison blasted this during the conference, saying that the company is actually a major force in cloud computing. In fact, 19 out of the top 20 cloud-computing vendors, including competitors to Oracle, are offering products and services based on the company's databases. These include SAP and Salesforce.com.
Aside from simply offering cloud-computing products and services, Oracle needs to make sure too that its existing lineup will still work in the cloud. This hasn't been tested extensively in the mainstream and could pose potential problems for the company.
The keynote session in the conference was Ellison's first since he became Oracle's CTO. After he stepped down as CEO, Catz and Mark Hurd took over.
