Oracle’s second position on cloud

Oracle is, as might be expected of one of the major on-premise legacy applications providers, trying to face both ways at once when it comes to cloud services.

With a huge installed base of on-premise applications it has to ensure that these long-standing and loyal customers continue to be served in the way that they expect. But with the cloud bringing new customers looking to work in different ways, it has to be able to at least show it is trying to match their expectations as well.

So following on the from last month’s announcement of partnerships with the two leading providers of SaaS-delivered business services – Salesforce for CRM and Netsuite for ERP and business management - Oracle has now shown some of its hand for bringing cloud capabilities to its traditional user base.  

As might be expected, the underlying theme runs counter to the more open, partner-oriented approach geared to providing the tools and applications needed to build collaborative service environments. This time the story is more akin to the technology lock-in that in practice represents the traditional Oracle customer comfort factor.

The key developments are upgrades to the company’s Cloud Application Foundation, and in particular providing stronger and closer links between its WebLogic application server and its Coherence data caching technology. In addition, the latter has also been given more hooks into Oracle’s flagship 12c database system.

The idea behind this is to provide tighter links in Oracle’s middleware, with the expectation that it will save time for infrastructure administrators and improve data portability across those infrastructures.  

Having been originally developed by BEA, WebLogic has till now persisted with its own installation routine. But now it has been given the same management framework that runs across all the Oracle Fusion middleware. It can now, therefore, be installed and patched using the same process as Coherence.

The link between the two has been further strengthened by natively integrating Coherence into WebLogic as a first class Container. Oracle is branding this as Managed Coherence Servers, which should then be easier to install and manage from within WebLogic.

A symbol of Oracle’s dilemma in squaring the circle of a move towards cloud service delivery and its well-established on-premise customer base has been the company’s reaction to some core cloud technologies, such as multi-tenanted databases. The company has for some time held the belief that this is not a good model. More to the point, it has held the belief that it is not a model its customers would be drawn to accepting.

But there is a logic to multi-tenanting, and for a growing number of users the fears concerning data security, particularly the possibility of `migration’ between users, have subsided. So for its own user base, and especially those looking to run cloud applications and service in Oracle’s Exadata compute systems, the company came up with a solution to this issue.

Database 12c now sports a multi-tenant pluggable feature which gives users data isolation in each of the pluggable databases.