Oracle aims for Leadership in Enterprise cloud offerings

By Rich Ptak

                  Copyright 2018,Oracle and partners

Oracle executives, Rahul Patil, VP of Software Development and Kash Iftikhar, VP of Product Management and Strategy Oracle recently announced plans for significant enhancements and extensions to Oracle’s cloud infrastructure that will roll out over the next calendar year. The additions are part of Oracle’s strategic plan to become the premier provider of enterprise-ready cloud solutions. They intend to do so by filling-in existing gaps in current enterprise cloud solution offerings.

Oracle hasn’t been idle in the cloud infrastructure market, but they have not cracked into the Big Three. The current product and market team aims to change that with an aggressive and targeted strategy to be the best through their innovative use and application of technology. Here’s how they expect to accomplish that.

Identifying enterprise concerns and competitive opportunity

Oracle identified their pathway to success lay in addressing enterprise-specific concerns not adequately being addressed by existing solutions. They proceeded to identify gaps in available functionality, services and performance that existed in areas of special concern to enterprise IT, especially those exposed in competitor products. Oracle would also leverage the size and strengths inherent in their existing data-focused installed base.

The existing cloud infrastructure gaps that they believe they can effectively address are:

1. Inconsistent operational performance and monitoring (e.g. in security, data management, performance, etc.) – by providing reliable, predictable service, performance as well as performance-based SLAs (not available from other cloud vendors);
2. Limited capability and offerings in support of Oracle DB and apps – by expanding Oracle’s own service/support capabilities, extending the ecosystem and open standards; 
3.  Address the issue of higher than expected long-term pricing and expense of add-on and hidden service charges – by transparent pricing policies, software license portability, etc.;
4. Limited support of open systems and standards resulting in non-standard, proprietary services that limited enterprise flexibility – by expanding Oracles commitment to open systems, standards and policies;
5. Limited vendor understanding of enterprise and vertical industries that prevents getting full value from cloud infrastructure – by focusing their efforts on specific workloads and sectors where they have extensive experience.

Oracle identified four areas of technology with which Oracle could deliver services and deliverables that gave then significant competitive differentiation and advantages. Oracle identified the technology areas as: security, open integration, comprehensive data management and high-performance infrastructure. Oracle and partner-driven ecosystem efforts will provide the products and services based on these over the next year.  

Oracle Cloud Differentiation

Oracle recognized they could not effectively address the needs of all possible market problems and solutions. But Oracle has its own specific strengths and experiences from working with their existing customers. Based on that history, Oracle identified workloads where they could bring to market the best and most effective combinations of products, infrastructure, and services. The workloads they settled on and specific performance goals are as follows:

1. Enterprise move & improve – deliver an integrated offering of infrastructure, applications, support and services that provides the lowest risk and cost for workload migration to the Oracle environment;
2. High performance computing – provide a robust infrastructure in support of traditional HPC applications, as well as the newest in Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning workloads;
3. Data Intensive Applications – design and deliver infrastructure platform that will support the most performance intensive, highly scalable workloads, such as those for big data collections, analysis and reporting;
4. Cloud Native Applications – provide access to a fully programable infrastructure which extends from a base of bare metal servers to fully configured systems able to perform efficient, fully scalable support for a range of cloud-first applications.

Starting in October 2018 and extending over the next 12 months, Oracle will roll-out new and expanded services in each of these areas by applying the four technologies listed earlier. The results will be seen in the form of:

1. Core to Edge Security – implement pervasive security that extends from the core to the end user, in both directions;
2. Pervasive open integration – an expanded focus on openness and portability implemented and integrated for both old and new architectures; 
3.  Comprehensive data management and storage – deliver a full-range of data management services for autonomous databases, application-centric storage capability; 
4.  High-performance core infrastructure – provide a subscription network that delivers the highest performance with lowest cost components. 

To complement these Oracle deliverables, they have an expanded and growing support infrastructure of third-party partners and ISVs providing services to an extensive Oracle customer base.

These are big ambitions, Oracle appears confident in their ability to deliver all of these and more in the next 12 months. Let’s examine the basis for their confidence.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Oracle’s Cloud solution consists of the Oracle-technology-based cloud infrastructure. Added to this is a comprehensive collection of Oracle-backed cloud applications targeting specific business functions.  To build, extend and deploy cloud-ready/first applications there is an integrated cloud platform consisting of DevOp tools, services, apps and processes to build and support cloud applications. Finally, there is the extended, open ecosystem of partners and alliances delivering a growing catalog of applications, tools, services, and end-to-end solutions. Let’s look a little closer.

The foundation of Oracle’s Cloud is its fully programmable public cloud infrastructure that includes integrated, open services of high-performance, fully scalable network capabilities, compute power and storage capacities. This offering is complemented by an Oracle-managed on-premise hybrid cloud complete with apps and tools to meet enterprise needs and implemented behind a client’s firewall.

Oracle offers a range of cloud-specific applications, which include analytics, supply chain management, ERP, integrated HR systems and services, CX (customer experience) management and administration and, of course, full data collection, analysis, management and reporting.

Oracle has 6 cloud infrastructure installations in operation around the world today. Over the next 12 months, they will add 15 more such installations including certified, government-focused cloud regions. A few statistics about Oracle cloud operations provide an idea of the extent of operations today: Oracle’s Data Cloud serves 500K request per second, supports 43 billion API calls in real-time every day, collects 7.5 trillion data points monthly, supports 2,200 bare metal compute instances and handles 11 petabytes of data. Customers range from tech startups like WIDGET to the US government to Rolls Royce to CERN laboratories to Office Depot.

Summary

We’ve just touched on some of the details of Oracle’s cloud strategy, plans and product offerings. What we’ve seen and heard from Oracle itself impressed us. We did some of our own research and held conversations independent of that briefing; the result is that we are willing to lend some considerable credence to the appropriateness and quality of Oracle’s strategy and planning. They have identified a realistic set of problems to solve workloads to focus on and technologies to leverage in their pursuit of the enterprise cloud market. We’ll be watching them as they execute against their plan. 

There is a major battle underway to become THE PLATFORM for the Digital age. The ability to collect, organize and process data to rapidly extract wisdom from it is a key influence for success in that battle. Despite what some believe, no one has a lock on the enterprise cloud market. Even the dominant general-purpose cloud vendors will have to fight for a piece of unclaimed market for cloud-specific, cloud-specific, specialized workloads which will dominate future growth.

Today, Oracle’s history with data, properly leveraged in combination with their existing on-prem cloud base, might well prove to be the significant and decisive success factor. Building on its strengths, Oracle is focused on easing and facilitating migration to the cloud. In addition to accommodating non-Oracle apps and workloads, the stated aim is the be the best cloud, bar none, to run Oracle-centric workloads. A welcome switch from those simply offering complex tool kits and expensive services.

We think Oracle is well worth investigating by enterprises looking for a partner in the journey to a digital future and cloud computing. In the meantime, we wish Oracle the best in their efforts.