Mark Davison at Oracle OpenWorld, San Francisco – Oracle CEO Larry Ellison bunked his keynote today for a climactic America’s Cup, but executive vice-president for product development, Thomas Kurian, ably picked up the ball and made three new cloud announcements he says will see Oracle being perceived in a new light.
Chairman of the Oracle board, Jeff Henley, apologised for Ellison’s absence before Kurian launched into his presentation.

“He [Ellison]wishes he could be here, but he can’t be in two places at once,” Henley said.

Kurian says that when Oracle announced almost three years ago that it intended being a serious player in applications, many had doubted it could be. But with the development of Oracle Application Suite, he says, the company had proved them wrong.

“We now have more than 20-million users, 10 000 companies in 180 countries and in 34 languages,” Kurian says. “And it’s all one community.”
Now, he adds, it is time for the next step.

“We took our Application Suite and said: Wouldn’t it be nice if people got a great platform to go with it?” Kurian continues. “So, today, we’re introducing a broad set of platforms to go with these applications.”
The trio of announcements include: Oracle Database as a cloud service; Java as a service in Oracle Cloud; and Oracle Infrastructure as a service through Oracle Cloud.

“This suite of platform services is unique in three ways,” Kurian says. “It will integrate with all your applications; it is the same software that you use on your premises; and, most importantly, we will manage the software for you.”

The first new product, Oracle Database Cloud Service, will support both 11g and 12 versions of the company’s database.

“What is it?” Kurian asks. “Simply, we are taking the world’s best database and making it available in the cloud. You can go to Oracle Cloud and get a dedicated database. And Oracle manages it for you – all patches, all upgrades – so that you can focus on using the database and building applications.”

Oracle Database Cloud Service will be available to users on a subscription, pay-as-you-go basis with three levels – basic, managed and maximum availability.

“Step two,” Kurian says, “is we’re taking Java as a service into Oracle Cloud. Again, it is the same WebLogic you use on your premises and, again, Oracle will manage it for you.

“With these two new products, customers can now have a database and a Java environment up and running within 20 to 30 minutes,” Kurian says.
“Just think about how long it would normally take for this going through the normal on-premise process … days at least.”

The new Java offering will also have three tiers of service in basic, managed and maximum availability.

Rounding off the trio of new products is Oracle Infrastructure as a service through Oracle Cloud which, Kurian says, offers two new crucial services – storage and compute.

“With our storage service, users will have the ability to use the cloud to store anything from files and objects through to logs,” he says. “But it is with the compute services that we’re really excited. You can build your applications in Java, but what if you want to build in Ruby … or C++? Now you can use our compute services for this.

“These compute environments are fully isolated – customers will get full management access, full root access, but full network isolation.”

Kurian says that these two new services on their own move Oracle forward in the era of infrastructure as a service.

“People told us three years ago that we wouldn’t be a cloud company,” he says.

“But 21,5-million people and 10 000 companies will tell you they love Oracle Cloud. Add to that application platforms and infrastructure and it allows you to do two very important things: it gives the customer a platform to change IT; and it makes them more agile.
“It saves costs and gives speed,” he adds. It is easy to provision, easy to use and it’s easy to move workloads – and it’s all based on software you run on-premise.

“We believe in this vision that we’ve worked on for nearly five years now and we’re seeing Oracle being perceived in a new light,” Kurian says. “We can change your experience and we can transform the way we deliver software to companies all around the world.”

** Editor’s Note: Larry Ellison may well have had good reason to skip his keynote for the America’s Cup final. Oracle Team USA won both races today to tie the longest final in the trophy’s history with Emirates New Zealand 8-8.

They have won seven races in a row and come back from a two-point penalty in what the US press is hailing as “the greatest sporting comeback ever”. Tomorrow sees the final, deciding race in the America’s Cup final taking place in San Francisco Bay, weather permitting.