Larry Ellison Details Oracle's Cloud Plans

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During his keynote address at Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced four new cloud-related offerings. The company plans to take on the existing cloud players with an entire suite of cloud products and services.

According to The Wall Street Journal, “Oracle will add infrastructure as a service to the Oracle Public Cloud, putting the enterprise software company in competition with pioneers Amazon.com Inc. and Google Inc. The Redwood Shores-based company also announced it will begin building and operating cloud services inside client data centers and a new version of its Exadata database machine with built in memory so it won’t have to rely on external storage.”

In addition, Oracle is updating its flagship database for the cloud. “The next version of Oracle’s database will feature support for multitenancy as a critical feature, providing superior security, control and efficiency for software services delivered from the cloud,” reported Chris Kanaracus in Computerworld. Ellison called it “the first multitenant database in the world” and noted that it offers a “fundamentally new architecture.”

ZDNet’s Jack Clark quoted Ellison as saying, “The infrastructure that we’re offering isn’t conventional infrastructure. What we’re offering is our OS, our VM, compute services and storage services on the fastest, most reliable machines in the world — on our engineered systems — all networked together with a modern Infiniband network.” The ZDNet article later continued, “From my end it seems as though Oracle wants to erect a self-contained cloud which gives customers few reasons to go to other vendors for other technology. This is the ‘cathedral’ attitude, compared with Amazon and Google’s less proprietary ‘slum’ free-for-all.”

In the past, Ellison had famously ridiculed cloud computing. InformationWeek’s Doug Henschen wrote, “The irony of seeing Larry Ellison extol the virtues of cloud computing, in-memory computing, and multitenancy after so many memorable attacks on earlier versions of these technologies offered by rivals was indeed rich. But… Ellison’s message was that Oracle alone is uniquely positioned and has designed innovative technology to deliver cloud computing (and in-memory database, fast storage, and various other technologies) in a superior way.”