Database giant Oracle today moved to strengthen its position as a full-service cloud provider, using CloudWorld, a one-day conference convening in New York City, to announce new products and plans to open several new regions this year and next.
The cloud “is an irresistible force,” said Oracle CEO Mark Hurd during his opening keynote, which he kept at a non-technical level for the benefit of CEOs and other executives in the audience. “This is the way things are going to go. The sooner you get on board, the better.”
The movement to the cloud “isn’t just about technology,” he added. “It’s about a business model, a new way of thinking about our industry. That’s why cloud is as much a CEO and CFO discussion as a CIO and IT discussion.”
At the event, Oracle announced plans to open three new cloud regions by mid-year, in Reston, Va.; London, UK; and Turkey. Each new region will consist of at least three high-bandwidth, low-latency sites, which Oracle calls availability domains. The domains will be located “several miles” from each other and will operate in a “completely fault-independent manner,” Oracle said in a release.
Though best known for its conventionally licensed, on-premises database, Oracle very much wants to be seen as a faster, cheaper competitor in the IaaS arena, going up directly against market leader Amazon Web Services and the other three principal contenders in the cloud: Microsoft, Google and IBM.
In September, founder, CTO and chairman Larry Ellison declared that Amazon’s cloud-computing “lead is over” and that AWS is about to get some “serious competition going forward.” The next day, at Oracle’s OpenWorld users’ conference, he spent a full hour asserting that Oracle running on its own cloud outperforms AWS’s Redshift data warehouse.
Today’s event in New York is still under way, available via webcast.
On the topic of products and technology, Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s president of product development, made it clear that Oracle wants a piece not only of database as a service but also of infrastructure and platform as a service. In fact, in a release today, the company claims that “Oracle Cloud is the industry’s broadest and most integrated public cloud, including software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service.” Not only that, but it will be cheaper than AWS, he said, showing a slide comparing pricing.
In conjunction with today’s event, Oracle announced the availability of its Database Cloud Service on bare-metal compute, and new capabilities for virtual-machine compute, load balancing and storage.
The company’s infrastructure as a service now offers one-, two- and four-core virtual-machine “shapes” (profiles), which run on the same network as its bare-metal compute shapes, block volumes and object storage. A new load-balancing service adds three provisioned bandwidth levels — 100Mbps, 400Mbps, and 8Gbps — supporting a range of application-traffic, high-availability and security needs. Other enhancements include a new block storage shape (2TB) and encryption at rest for object storage.
Kurian said Oracle’s PaaS will support development using more than 100 open-source apps.
With the expansion of its cloud regions, Oracle will have doubled its regions in the last two years, bringing the total to 29 worldwide. Additional regions are planned for the Asian Pacific, North America and Middle East areas by mid-2018.
Oracle said its cloud now delivers nearly 1,000 SaaS applications and 50 PaaS and IaaS services to customers in more than 195 countries around the world and supports 55 billion transactions each day. Customers include Brinks, Doosan, Falkonry, G&J Pepsi Bottlers, GE, Pernod Ricard, RadioShack, Safe Ports, T-Mobile, Trek, the University of Kansas and Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.
Oracle HCM Cloud improved HR efficiency at G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers by boosting recruiting and onboarding effectiveness, said Christina Walker, the company’s EVP of HR, in a release. Using Oracle Cloud at MCH Strategic Data for in-house app development and testing to provision new database environments cut time to market from months to weeks, said Brian Vogelsmeier, director of IT at that company.
Oracle’s fervent embrace of the cloud shows the company has come a long way since 2009, when Ellison went on a lengthy and impassioned rant against cloud computing. But it still isn’t where it wants to be.
The company in December reported sharply increased revenue from PaaS and SaaS for its 2QFY17 ended Nov. 30. But revenue was minimal from the IaaS that undergirds cloud leaders AWS and Microsoft Azure. IaaS accounted for a scant $175 million in revenue, or 2 percent of the quarter’s total $9 billion. That was flat with the year-ago period. SaaS and PaaS revenue combined was $878 million, up from $484 million last year.
