Oracle claims IaaS edge on Amazon

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Most notable was the new IaaS push.

But he did offer this tidbit a year ago: Oracle would offer dedicated compute resources at half the price of AWS’ shared compute.

How much of this is bravado?

Hurd spoke from Oracle OpenWorld, the company’s annual conference in San Francisco, which kicked off with warring words from the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison.

Oracle’s major competitors are now Amazon Web Services Inc. for infrastructure and Workday for applications – where in the past they were IBM for infrastructure and SAP for applications.

But as more companies shift their operations to the cloud, the infrastructure-as-a-service market is crucial for Oracle.

The infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering that Ellison announced on stage is aimed at giving companies low-priced access to incredibly powerful hardware in the cloud. As the most complete, modern, and proven ERP Cloud solution, Oracle ERP Cloud’s rapidly expanding customer base includes strong momentum in the public sector and with state and local governments. You don’t have to buy the hardware, you don’t have to buy the software, it’s offered as a subscription service.

As for SaaS, Ellison insists Oracle is already the largest SaaS vendor in the world with almost $4 billion in annual SaaS revenue (despite the fact that Salesforce claims $6.7 billion).

Or as Ellison described it, “You simply text with your enterprise application”. Oracle is also entering the bot arena. DocuSign’s integrations including with Oracle CPQ Cloud, Oracle Sales Cloud, Oracle Documents Cloud, Enterprise Contracts, Oracle Documaker, Oracle’s PeopleSoft, and Oracle WebCenter Content can enable customers to transact business more quickly, easily and securely digitally in the Oracle Cloud. Here, Oracle appears to be positioning its PaaS to run legacy workloads: The company offers a public cloud version of WebLogic and of course the Oracle Database, with an AppToCloud function to lift your database and WebLogic cluster skyward. On the most recent report, Oracle didn’t crack the list.

“By collecting this data and marrying it to things like micro location information, consumer search histories, websites visits and product comparisons along with their demographic data, and past purchase data, Oracle will be able to predict purchase intent better than anyone”.

Cloud first for the mothership? “Long run, we think suites will win”.

A key part of enabling that coexistence, he said, is Oracle Cloud @ Customer. “IaaS represents a huge new cloud opportunity for Oracle to layer on top of our rapidly growing SaaS and PaaS businesses”.

Among other highlights in his keynote, Ellison said that Oracle is acquiring Palerra, which extends Oracle Identity Cloud Service with a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB).