Oracle boosts cloud offering, aims at Amazon
Tue 23 Jun 2015
Oracle, headed up by Larry Ellison, announced on Monday that it would be making an aggressive incursion into cloud computing, competing with big industry names such as Amazon.
“We’re prepared to compete with Amazon.com on price,” said Ellison, as the tech giant announced 24 new cloud offerings including cloud storage services, cloud CRM and cloud-enabled Oracle apps.
“We’re now able to call our cloud services complete. With today’s announcement, you can now move all your applications out of the data centre and into the Oracle cloud,” Ellison told an audience at Oracle’s headquarters.
Last quarter Oracle sold $426mn (approx. £270mn) worth of its business in Software and Platform as a Service solutions and now plans decisively to enter the cloud race.
“Oracle is the only company on the planet that can deliver a complete, integrated, standards-based suite of services at every layer of the cloud,” Ellison added.
“Those technology advantages enable us to be much more cost-effective than our competitors. Our new Archive Storage service goes head-to-head with Amazon Glacier and it’s one-tenth their price,” he continued.
One of the new services Exadata allows Oracle users to run their databases in the cloud with exactly the same functionality as is delivered on-premises. The new cloud-based programme is completely compatible with those hosted on-premises, Oracle assured.
The Oracle ‘deep cloud’ Archive Storage Service was also showcased. According to the firm, the utility is best suited for working with large-scale infrequently accessed data, such as financial records, medical files, and insurance archives.
Ellison advised that Oracle’s cloud strength had been highlighted in last quarter’s sales, which he said had set an “industry record.”
However to compete as it wishes with Amazon’s cloud dominance, Oracle has a lot of work to do. The company pulled in $2.3bn in cloud revenue last year, whereas AWS recorded around $6bn.
