BUSINESS
Oracle jumps into the cloud
20-09-2010
by Dermot Corrigan
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison kicked off the Oracle OpenWorld 2010 conference in San Francisco on Sunday by moving Oracle firmly into the cloud computing space.
Ellison's major announcement was Oracle's new 'private cloud in a box' offering, the Exalogic Elastic Complete Cloud. This stand-alone product combines hardware and software and includes 30 servers, high-speed storage, networking equipment and virtual machine technology - everything required for organisations to build their own internal private cloud platforms.
Ellison claimed that this standardised platform would be cheaper, more efficient and more easily supported than competing cloud infrastructures patched together using elements from different vendors.
For Oracle the cloud is a "standards-based application development and execution platform" incorporating hardware and software, which is virtualised and elastic, Ellison said. This means Oracle is more in tune with Amazon's EC2 concept, than Salesforce.com's software-as-a-service approach, he said.
Exalogic follows the release of Oracle's Exadata database machine in 2008, and continues Oracle's policy of selling stand-alone systems, which was helped by its 2009 acquisition of Sun Microsystems. OpenWorld 2010's tagline is ‘Hardware and Software. Engineered to Work Together’.
HP's Dave Donatelli and Ann Livermore were on stage prior to Ellison's appearance, explaining how HP could help companies modernise their applications and data centres. Neither they nor Ellison mentioned the reported tension between the two companies after Oracle hired former HP CEO Mark Hurd earlier this month.
Over 41,000 Oracle customers and partners from 116 countries are at OpenWorld, which runs until Thursday in San Francisco. More details and the entire keynote video are here. Watch out for more coverage of OpenWorld on ENN during the week.
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