Oracle’s new platform-as-a-service rounds up its new, ‘buffed up’ cloud platform, giving the latter many, many immediate benefits that businesses can take advantage of now.
During his second keynote, CTO Larry Ellison demonstrated the ease with which database and apps could be ported from on-premise to the cloud. He emphasised over and over again that existing apps would be modernised and inherit modern app capabilities – mobility, social, big data and analytics – because these are also the qualities of the underlying platform that these apps sit upon.
So for example, it would be easier to build analytics into the application.
Ellison also wanted to point out that when customers use the same platform Oracle uses to build the app, to also extend the application, the extensions would look like part of the app.
The Oracle cloud platform makes it easy to build these apps, and with security inherently built-in.
“Most SaaS companies do not sell platform services at same time. Salesforce build on Oracle, and then sell their Salesforce One solution on a proprietary non standards-based platform!”
Another thing to note is one single unified Oracle Enterprise Manager is able to manage on-premise and cloud as well.
What you can do with portability
According to Oracle Executive VP of Product Development, Thomas Kurian, a number of different use cases for Oracle’s PaaS, have emerged.
First and foremost is test & development and production. “With standard Oracle database and standard Java code, you can do test and development in the cloud, and then move it back on-premise for production.”
There is also now opportunity for departmental data marts that are used for analytics and reporting, to be consolidated with the bigger corporate data warehouse.
Kurian also observed, “We see a lot of customers wanting project implementation systems. There are many system integrators (SI), using our cloud now, and the reason is because they are doing projects to prepare for customer deployment.
Thjs is so, the SI can move the environment to the customer premise if required, once they have won the bid to implement the project for the customer.
“This way, SIs don’t have to buy dedicated IT infrastructure for the duration of the project. There are many with this use case, that is on going.”
Last but not least, is having a standby system on the cloud. “So, there is a production system on-premise. And it is easy to have a standby in the cloud as well, because both have the same code base.”
Having this portability means three things for Kurian.
“First, it opens up the number of different use cases that you can support,” said Kurian.
It also makes for a simplified IT organisation, because moving workloads from one management console means less resources are being used. It also mitigates the risk of companies losing control of their data on the cloud, because they would be able to port it easily back to their own premises.
The capabilities that have emerged so far, are very, very powerful capabilities.
But how well would these workloads fare when having to move from one cloud to another?
To be continued in Part 2
(This journalist is a guest of Oracle’s to Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco)
