Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has been on the warpath for most of this week after announcing the data giant’s move to the cloud, in what was modestly described in the press releases as “the most comprehensive cloud on the planet Earth”.
Oracle Cloud had according to Ellison been seven years in the making, which perhaps explains its comprehensive nature, but the credentials sound pretty good at face value.
Delivering software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), Oracle Cloud’s main strength is what they call “functionally rich, integrated, secure, enterprise cloud services” – in other words, a fully-fledged cloud system which incorporates 100 self-service applications and platform services.
The announcement also explained the cloud’s various facets, such as allowing users to schedule their own upgrades as and when, and claiming to be the only cloud which avoided business process fragmentation.
The numbers were impressive too. Over 25 million people are currently on the Oracle Cloud, alongside 10,000 customers and – at the time of print – 25,000 followers for Ellison’s official Twitter account, who started his tweeting life with a not-at-all-veiled dig at rivals SAP.
It’s an understatement to say that this is a big deal for Oracle, who has mainly been in the news for the wrong reasons of late – particularly with losing ground to Google in their protracted Silicon Valley patents battle.
But the company has received criticism since the Oracle Cloud announcement.
One of the more prominent was from analyst Frank Scavo, who claimed that Ellison was not only “rewriting history” by claiming the gestation period of Oracle Cloud was seven years, he was also exaggerating Oracle Cloud’s capabilities.
“Seeing that Oracle announced five [applications] during Open World, it’s difficult to understand how it is now claiming 100, unless it is talking about very small pieces of functionality,” Scavo told Business Cloud 9.
Add this to the now infamous “brush-off” of the term cloud computing by Ellison, and the ammunition is certainly there.
So who’s right then? Does Oracle Cloud have the potential to be a genuine game changer, or is it just another load of hot air?
