Oracle has traditionally been a very good technology company.  But the cloud is changing all that.

Recently, the company has reported stagnant growth in new software sales.  Many industry observers are saying that this is because businesses are looking at other suppliers who can take them to the cloud.

The emergence of players such as RightScale, Zendesk, Optimizely, Asana and other similar companies helped complicate things for Oracle.  Instead of attracting CIOs and IT heads, it offered end users a free version of its software.  Once the users find the software very useful, it started charging for new features and other services.  Now it is the users who are bugging IT departments to pay for these services.

So what is Oracle to do?  Play its game and get on the cloud itself.  With its new 12c suite of products, it is doing just that.

Oracle is now described as a cloud provider.  And we are seeing the company trudge into cloud territory increasingly over the past few months, specifically with its 12c products.

First, there is the Oracle Database 12c, which the company calls as the first database to be designed for the cloud.  It allows for simplified provisioning, better resource allocation, and easier and faster cloning.  All these services are crucial in the cloud.

It has a multi-tenant architecture on a fast, reliable, secure and scalable database platform.  With Database 12c, you can benefit from more than 500 enhanced or new features that could help you take advantage of Big Data, analytics and the cloud.  You can use it to create private clouds, as well as give software-as-a-service providers more offerings for their own services.

Database 12c also powers Oracle’s own public cloud services under its Oracle Cloud offering.

The Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Control, on the other hand, helps your database administrators manage the features built into Database 12c.

Oracle also has the Oracle WebLogic Server 12c that allows you to use the best application server there is for creating, maintaining and deploying Java EE apps for your enterprise, while also allowing you to have low total cost of operations, better performance and scalability, as well as inherent support for Oracle Applications.

Oracle’s line of 12c products (the “c” in 12c stands for cloud, by the way) is only the tip of the iceberg.  The company knows that there is no getting around the cloud and to ignore it is to die a slow, painful death.  This is the reason why it has also been partnering extensively to make sure that its 12c products are being offered on other platforms.  Oracle Cloud, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce.com now run Oracle software at some level.  In a gist, 12c is Oracle’s strong push to stay relevant.

And you should use it, too.  With Oracle’s 12c software, you can ease your business into the cloud and gain the benefits.  Four Cornerstone can help you ease into Oracle’s 12c offerings, everything from Oracle licensing, to relational schema and entity design, to SQL design and code development for MySQL databases, we have experts that can help you! Call us now!

Photo courtesy of Oracle_Photos_Screenshots.