In last year’s Open World Conference, Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle made some bold predictions regarding the Cloud. In his keynote address, he spoke of the economic stress facing the C-Suite and highlighted how a technological shift can help businesses improve not just their revenues but also their business opportunities. Hurd also mentioned that in order to generate revenues, organizations need to invest in the future of business instead of IT initiatives that cause more revenue drain. Thus, moving from the on-premise IT operating model to the Cloud is not only a sustainable model but also reduce technical debt. He also stated that in the next ten years we can expect to see over 80% of all production apps to be in the cloud. Presently this number stands at 25%. Amongst other things he stated that Oracle is prepared to offer enterprises a more secure IT environment – “We are fully patched, fully secured, fully encrypted—that’s our cloud,” said Hurd.
Global enterprises are also leaning towards the Cloud with organizations such as GE planning to run more than 70% of their applications on it. As the world gets ‘Cloudier’, Oracle has held on to their promise on making their cloud more perfect for the enterprises. Here’s a look at five announcements made by Oracle over the last few months that strengthen their Cloud promise.
Oracle Updates Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Services
In October last year, Oracle updated their cloud infrastructure services to offer enterprises “flexible, proven, and secure infrastructure to run their enterprise workloads in the cloud.” With this update Oracle announced five new infrastructure offerings; the Oracle Oracle Elastic Compute Cloud, Oracle Storage Cloud Service – Archive Storage, Oracle Storage Cloud Service – File Storage, Oracle Network Cloud, Oracle Container Cloud and Pre-Certified Technology and Applications Stacks. With these offerings, Oracle promised to offer elasticity, cost advantage, extensibility and the flexibility to operate on shared data sets, multiple connectivity options and network bonding and the opportunity to run and even automate applications within Docker containers.
Oracle Unveils StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager 7
The 1st of March witnessed Oracle announcing a data protection solution for the enterprises that was more secure and scalable with the StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager 7. This solution works for heterogeneous systems and mainframes and also has the capacity to ‘fully automated tiering directly to the public cloud’. The StorageTek system provides storage administrators a built-in cloud strategy by seamlessly integrating Oracle Storage Cloud Service—Object Storage and Oracle Storage Cloud Service – Archive Service. Performance and scalability, enhanced security by enabling wide-key encryption for data without performance compromise with the help of SPARC M7 processor, a single point of contact for all mainframe storage, and heterogeneous storage and a “lights out” disaster recovery strategy are some of this benefits of this system.
Oracle simplifies cloud adoption with a suite of offerings
Later in March 2016, Oracle announced a suite of services to make could adoption simpler for the enterprise. With these offerings, Oracle made the cloud transition easier for the enterprises by allowing them to use Oracle Public Cloud Services both in the Oracle Cloud or in the organization’s own data center. These services gave organizations full control over their data and enabled data sovereignty, allowed workload portability, facilitated movement of Oracle and non-Oracle workloads between on-premise and cloud base and ensured compliance with security and regulatory norms.
Launch of New SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS Cloud Services
With the release of the new Oracle Cloud services, Oracle enhanced the depth of its portfolio across the SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS stack. The main aim of this move was to improve business agility, lower IT complexity, lower costs and to allow organizations to capitalize on disruptive technologies such as IoT and Big Data. These offerings are highly personalized and extremely secure and allow organizations to streamline business processes and fast-track innovation. The Oracle Infrastructure services ensure that enterprises are equipped to handle the workloads, networking and storage requirements.
Oracle Accelerated Buying Experience
To make buying Cloud services faster and easier, Oracle launched their Oracle Accelerated Buying Experience service in April. With this offering, Oracle made it possible to purchase Cloud services with just a click of a button. Oracle used applications such as Service and Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) and Oracle Sales to process the sales and eliminated the need to fill in long processing order forms and also offered contract flexibility. The “click-to-accept” button dismissed the needs of multiple signatures to complete the order process and made the cloud buying process as simple as it can get.
In his closing note at the Open World conference, Mark Hurd mentioned that ‘a dual, hybrid on-premise/cloud environment will continue and that 10 years from now, on-premise will still be here.” The initiatives that Oracle has taken over the past few months just demonstrate the seriousness with which they are moving in that direction. Oracle definitely loved the cloud. Now they are just proving how much they do!