Oracle packs out its cloud services offerings

Over the years it has become a reasonably standard line from Oracle that running as much Oracle product as possible together is the best option for many businesses. And for the users there has been a certain logic to that argument – if Oracle can’t get its products to interoperate to the customers’ best advantage then at least they know which backside to kick.

There were large elements of this ethos still coming to the fore at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld conference, but in the area of cloud services at least it is a position that makes more sense than simply attempting to instil fear into the hearts of users.

The company has come up with additions to its range of cloud services, configured to service specific business functions, that will not only play to the obvious needs of committed Oracle users, but might just also attract other, new users to the Oracle fold. As the service becomes more important than the technology stack underpinning it, so the actual vendor of that service becomes less significant so, strangely, Oracle may find that it is attracting new customers because they are not considering the technology first and foremost.

The new services expand the company’s portfolio of Application, Social, Platform and Infrastructure Services. All are available on a subscription basis and are delivered integrated services across applications, social, platform and infrastructure. The company claims it now provides the most complete suite of modern, enterprise SaaS applications, ranging across Human Capital Management, Customer Experience, and Enterprise Resource Management, with built-in business intelligence, social and mobile capabilities.

The company also claims some real traction for its Cloud offerings, with some nine million users processing 19 billion transactions each day. The services run on 7,000 servers, with 200 petabytes of storage, in 13 datacentres around the world.

At OpenWorld, the company announced 10 new Cloud services.

Compute Cloud is aimed at customers looking for elastic compute capabilities to run any workload in the cloud. It is secure, enterprise-grade, fully configurable and provides robust monitoring capabilities. Object Storage Cloud provides users with a highly-available, redundant, and secure object store for persisting large amounts of unstructured data.

Database Cloud provides full control of a dedicated database instance and supports any Oracle Database application, giving users greater flexibility and choice over the level of managed services provided by Oracle. Java Cloud provides Oracle WebLogic Server clusters for deployment of Java applications and gives full administrative control over the service with automated backup, recovery, patching and high availability capabilities.

Business Intelligence Cloud is aimed at users looking to analyse data with visual, interactive dashboards for the Web and mobile devices. It provides self-service data loading, modelling, analysis, and application administration capabilities in the cloud without the assistance of IT. Documents Cloud: Provides a flexible, self-service file sharing and collaboration solution with mobile and desktop sync, robust security, and integration with on-premise and cloud applications.

Mobile Cloud simplifies enterprise mobile connectivity, enabling enterprises to build any application for any device that is connected to any data source with enterprise-grade security.  Database Backup Cloud enables businesses to backup Oracle Databases to the Oracle Cloud, plus replication of backups from the Oracle Database Backup Logging Recovery Appliance to Oracle Cloud.

Last on the list is the Billing and Revenue Management Cloud, which enables enterprises with robust and highly scalable subscription billing to capture recurring revenues from new services.

These new services join the following Oracle Cloud services. The Oracle Cloud Application Services portfolio includes Global HR Cloud, Talent Management Cloud, ERP Cloud, Supply Chain Management Cloud, Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Enterprise Planning Cloud, and Financial Reporting Cloud.

The Cloud Social Services portfolio includes Oracle Social Network, Social Marketing, Social Engagement and Monitoring, and Social Data and Insight, while the Platform Services portfolio includes Database Cloud, Java Cloud, and Developer Cloud, and Infrastructure Services portfolio, with Storage Cloud and Messaging Cloud.

Oracle is also following the lead of the long-established cloud players such as Netsuite and Salesforce in opening an applications repository service, known as Cloud Marketplace. This aims to provide a global marketplace where partners can publish applications and customers can browse through and discover new solutions that might address their business needs.