Forrester reports on Oracle’s Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud offering. I find it very interesting how they went about their initial SaaS cloud. It’s basically the Java App server and the Database setup in with sophisticated self service provisioning.
Basically, Oracle unveiled today a fully automated public cloud approach providing a Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) application platform and a full Oracle database in a sophisticated self-service provisioning leveraging a wide range of multitenancy capabilities. There is even a full set of high-level components, such as the identity management of Oracle’s Fusion Middleware, available within this service. Forrester expects that BPM and the remaining Fusion Middleware components will move into Oracle’s cloud offering shortly. This fully managed environment puts Oracle’s offering clearly in the camp of a PaaS provider — head-to-head with Microsoft’s Azure and salesforce.com’s Force.com. It is not at all challenging the lower level of raw infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) such as Amazon’s EC2. The approach also positions Oracle in a market of higher margins and less price pressure as we predicted for the next 10 years in our popular report, “Sizing The Cloud”. The platform is the basis for Oracle’s future SaaS strategy around its next-generation ERP application, Fusion Application, and a new collaboration style based on the new Oracle Social Network.
Why would this seem interesting or even compelling? Think about the huge amount of software run by Oracle that requires a Java App server and a database. It’s quite large. That’s just the typical model for a lot of software. They have the building blocks to build out their WebCenter stack, their middleware stack, and their security stack. If they do all that with a “sophisticated self service provisioning” model in mind then they have something very compelling to offer to the marketplace.
Of course, Oracle isn’t the only one working on the cloud. IBM has LotusLive for SaaS social collaboration. They are also ramping up their Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering with IBM Smart Cloud and support for Amazon EC2 machine images. Of course Microsoft is also hitting hard with Office 365 and Azure. That’s the SaaS and PaaS offerings respectively.
Overall, I’m kind of excited to see what’s coming. I know several of my clients are very interested although they have some serious concerns about security and flexibility. What they really want is a SaaS model with enough flexibility to meet their individual needs and that can be hard at times.
Pingback: amazon ec2 pricing