If you thought you could count Oracle out of the cloud-first world, you best think again.

Larry Ellison, the legendary founder of the world’s second largest software maker, isn’t talking about keeping his head above water at his company’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) event at the Oracle Conference Center on Oracle Parkway in Redwood Shores, Calif. (couldn’t he change the town’s name?).

“We are now able to call our cloud apps and platform technologies 'complete,'” he said.

And “complete” is a pretty dense word in Ellison-speak.

In this case it means that Oracle’s public cloud will host Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions ranging from data services to app dev services, analytics services, integration, content and collaboration services, compute and storage services …

There’s also a new suite of 24 enterprise applications that are available via SaaS and geared toward giving the likes of Salesforce and Workday a run for the money. 

SAP, Microsoft and Adobe should be forewarned as well, though Ellison questioned their cloud appeal.

Amazon, Azure, Google and anyone who wants to host applications or platforms in the cloud might want to throw in the white towel and utter “it was good while it lasted.” Ellison has a plan to dull their appeal too.

'Cozy and Covered'

This announcement speaks to two things, according to analyst Tim Crawford. “Enterprise comfort and a suites of apps,” he said.

To CIOs and business process owners, that translates to “You don’t have to leave Oracle to get the benefits of the cloud. We’ve got you cozy and covered.”

This news comes perhaps a little late, but still at a good time because some enterprises have had trouble moving their OLTP applications skyward.

If Oracle can deliver on its promise, it has solved that problem and then some. “We're the only ones who can move from on premise data processing and cloud data processing" using the same technology, Ellison said

“This is a big deal. This is big," he went on explaining that Oracle Cloud SaaS and PaaS are 100 percent compatible. "You can go both ways," he said … something that can’t happen with Amazon.

But capability isn’t the only place where Ellison is willing to go toe-to-toe. "We will compete against Amazon on price," he said.

Where archiving is concerned, Oracle’s services were built to melt Amazon’s Glacier. They’re 10x cheaper to use. EMC and Microsoft’s are comparatively more expensive, too. Not only that, but Ellison also insisted that “we’re high quality, safe, reliable," suggesting that the competition is not.

Big data and analytics couldn’t be left out of the announcement, of course.

Ellison’s deputy Thomas Kurian introduced a Data Discovery Cloud Service, which promises that business users can look at data in Hadoop through a visual, intuitive UI. We’ve heard this from other vendors. It will be interesting to see if Oracle’s plays out differently.

Someone could have asked Ellison the question, of course, but he virtually dropped the mike and walked off stage.

This is Larry’s world, mind you. Today he put the competition on notice, in case they forgot.

SOURCE: CMSWiRE