Oracle Extends Integrated Cloud Reach

Oracle (ORCL) this week flexed its cloud computing muscle this week with the launch of more than 24 different cloud services spanning everything from infrastructure to applications.

During a live event, Oracle Executive Chairman Larry Ellison heavily touted the fact that Oracle sold $426M worth of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) software in the last quarter, a 200 percent increase year-over-year. Much of Oracle’s current growth came in the last quarter alone. Oracle Cloud Platform now has more than 1,800 customers with 1,419 of those customers added in the last quarter.

Noting that the world has now changed in terms of who Oracle sees at its primary competitors, Ellison also dismissed traditional rivals such as IBM and SAP for being invisible in the market in favor of Microsoft and comparatively smaller cloud rivals such as Salesforce (CRM) and Workday.

While he recognized that Workday and Oracle compete fiercely in when it comes to delivering human resources applications, Ellison described Workday as basically being a non-entity when it came to ERP applications. At the same time, Ellison also made it clear that across he expects Oracle to grow 50 to 100 percent faster than Salesforce in terms of SaaS and PaaS revenue in the coming year.

In fact, the only competitor that Ellison seemed to deem really worthy of Oracle’s attention is Microsoft (MSFT), which is pursuing a similar hybrid cloud computing strategy that encompasses SaaS, PaaS and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS offerings. To that end Ellison made it clear that Oracle will continue to aggressively bundle all three classes of services to compete head-to-head with Microsoft, while also marginalizing IaaS rivals such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SaaS providers such as Workday.

At the core of that strategy is the promise of delivering a complete PaaS and SaaS portfolio that runs equally well on premise as it does in the cloud. Specifically, Ellison highlighted how via the single push of a button IT organizations can not only move Oracle software into the cloud, but if they so wish also back into an on premise environment.

With the exception a suite of manufacturing software due out later this year, Ellison said the Oracle Cloud Services portfolio is now complete. The latest additions to that portfolio include Oracle Archive Storage Cloud Service, Oracle Big Data Cloud Service and Big Data SQL Cloud Service, Oracle Integration Cloud Service, Oracle Process Cloud Service and an implementation of the Oracle Exadata database in the cloud.

Ellison also made it clear that Oracle would aggressively bundle different cloud services to be more competitive against any given set of rivals. For example, in addition to being able to match AWS service for service, Ellison noted that Oracle provides a PaaS environment that automates almost every aspect of software deployment while AWS does not. Conversely, Microsoft may have Azure, but it’s portfolio of SaaS applications is not nearly as robust as the Oracle portfolio. In addition, as part of an increasingly robust hybrid cloud computing strategy, Oracle has developed object storage technology in the cloud that appears to any application running on premise to be a natural extension of the NFS file system.

Put it all together and it’s becoming clear that Oracle along with its partners has become a force to be reckoned with. Left unspoken, of course, is just what impact a resurgent Oracle might have on the cloud computing firmament. There has, for example, already been speculation of an acquisition of Salesforce by Microsoft amongst others. Clearly, by bundling as many services as possible together Oracle means to deprive as many of its rivals as possible of the oxygen, also known as profits, needed to survive in age of the cloud.