Oracle announced a brace of new cloud products and services today, pushing versions of many of its existing services into the cloud and crowning the announcements with Database as a Service, revealed this afternoon by VP of product development, Thomas Kurian, in the absence of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.
The morning's announcements included Compute Cloud, which provides elastic compute capabilities for workloads in the cloud, Storage Cloud, which focuses on highly-available object store for persisting large amounts of unstructured data, and Database Cloud, which lets users control a dedicated database instance and supports Oracle Database applications with the aim of allowing customers greater control over Oracle managed services.
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Java Cloud, meanwhile, will provide Oracle WebLogic Server clusters to deploy Java applications, and includes full control over automated backup, recovering and patching.
Oracle also announced Cloud Marketplace, which takes the form of a global store where Oracle partners can publish their own applications.
Database as a Service, revealed by Kurian as he covered CEO Larry Ellison's keynote this afternoon, was announced alongside Java as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service.
Kurian said that Oracle "is perfectly positioned to help organisations unlock all the benefits of cloud computing," saying offering these three SaaS products gives Oracle "a comprehensive and growing set of functionally rich, integrated and secure cloud services" which offers a "full suite" of application, social, platform and infrastructure services.
Speaking to the press earlier in the day following the initial brace of announcements, Kurian was asked if, by launching so many new cloud products, Oracle was now trying to be "all things to all people".
"We don't necessarily think of our vision as all things to all people," replied Kurian.
"If you look at the large customers we work with, there are a couple of very simple observations we have. First of all, many large customers want to run ERP, HR and CRM in a single vendor environment because they don't want their data and business processes fragmented in lots of places. A simple example is Financials and HR - if you've got them both it can be complicated when cost centres are split between them."
Kurian continued to explain that, secondly, some customers prefer to just purchase a platform on its own, or just an infrastructure with a platform.
"So that's why we always had a strategy to start with the applications, add the platform, then the infrastructure," said Kurian.
"I don't think our strategy is to be one stop shopping. Some people interpret it that way, but that's not the primary element of the strategy. We want to offer best in breed platform, application suite and robust infrastructure to go along with it."
Kurian went on to explain that he believes Oracle's approach to platform as a service will stand out from the crowd.
"A lot of companies when they talk about platform as a service say 'Well, we're going to give you a compute service - you can deploy whatever image you have of the Oracle database or whatever you've got, and you at that point are responsible for patching it, maintaining it, backing it up and tuning it.
"The big difference with our database and cloud services is we manage that environment for you, and also give you a highly variable environment."
