Oracle Goes Head-to-Head with Amazon Web Services

It appears that Oracle (ORCL) will soon be joining the ongoing cloud pricing wars, but the company is hoping to attract customers to its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering by convincing its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) developers to launch apps with Oracle instead of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

At Oracle OpenWorld this week, Oracle CEO Mark Hurd said his company has a strategic advantage over Amazon by providing the PaaS capabilities developers are looking for. Hurd’s thinking seems to be: Why bother migrating your application to a different cloud provider when it’s ready to go live?

It’s an interesting strategy, but maybe not the most practical one. Some view IaaS and PaaS similarly to the separation of church and state. But there is some method to the madness. Oracle is positioning itself as the cloud provider. Although it was slow to catch onto this whole cloud craze, Oracle now sports IaaS, PaaS and software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. And if you listen to Hurd and chairman Larry Ellison, Oracle has it all.

In fact, that’s the takeaway from this year’s Oracle. The Oracle marketing machine is positioning the company as the one-stop shop that’s unmatchable by any other vendor. And if it keeps to its pricing promises, the one-stop shop will soon be on par with its biggest competitors.

Hurd also made the claim that Oracle is the company “that’s ahead in the cloud.” The company’s executives believe it has the strongest suite of cloud capabilities in the industry. But will that be enough to turn Oracle into a cloud powerhouse and rival the current leaders in the technology sector?

It’s a bold move by Oracle, which initially balked at cloud but has since come around. The company has stated before that the transition to the cloud is costing it revenue. It’s not the only company to feel such pressure, of course. Many traditional software vendors that have shifted to a cloud focus have felt the wrath of its users, as well as a hit to their bottom lines.