When it comes to cloud services, it is undeniable that Amazon is the undisputed leader. The company is now 10 years old and has 24,000 customers and continues to cement its lead with new services and offerings. Admittedly, however, the cloud services arena is a vast area that can accommodate different players who want to have a piece of the very big and lucrative pie.
Oracle has recently announced a cloud database service. The new bare metal offering combines Oracle’s application development and software as a service (Saas) products with its infrastructure services that primarily deliver the company’s core database services.
What is a bare metal database service?
Bare metal servers are not virtualized. Customers can access the physical machine and use it for high performance applications – for instance when you need to run applications such as Stack or Hadoop, use databases, or just about any other applications that are demanding on memory or input-output demands.
The company’s new bare metal database cloud service allows you to run databases using a dedicated machine that ensures the best security and granular management. You can run Oracle 12c or 11g Database in the cloud, while also optimizing the cloud environment to deliver the best database performance. And unlike physical databases, you can scale down or up as the need arises. The bare metal database offering is also very flexible as you can use the same database policies offered on Oracle’s Bare Metal Cloud Services.
The move shows that the company has changed its mind about the cloud. In the past, Oracle’s founder and chief technology officer was very vocal about his doubts regarding cloud technology, wondering whether it was just a fad or all hype. Over the years, however, the company has quietly worked on engineering and development to help amp up the company’s cloud platform.
The company details the new cloud offerings, which includes products for compute, network, storage, database, cloud and PaaS management, and SaaS services.
- Compute. Oracle IaaS cloud has three different flavors: physical, virtual, and bare metal. The physical non-virtualized Windows and Linux servers ensure isolation of your workloads, while the virtual server customers share resources with other customers. Meanwhile, the bare metal servers run on Docker containers. Their compute offering is unique in this variety and is the only one that provides isolation with their physical servers. The compute offering has some very cheap options as well, where you can get machines for as low as $0.10 per hour. Even the higher end machines, which provide up to 10 times better performance compared to others, only costs around 20% less.
- Network. Oracle wants to deliver better quality service by using fully encapsulated virtual networks that helps isolate your traffic. This allows you to avoid having to share network resources with others and help amp up your security.
- Storage. The company will offer file, block and object storage.
- Database. Oracle recognizes that its databases are its biggest selling points. They will offer databases that have the same SQL and API starting from $175 per month.
- SaaS. Oracle will be leveraging its already strong presence in the SaaS arena, providing tools for HCM, CRM and ERP.
- PaaS and cloud services. Oracle will also use its drag and drop user interfaces to hook more line of business developers. The company will also offer microservice applications and allow users to manage their cloud deployments and use the same tools to manage on premise systems and other public cloud platforms.
A fighting chance
Oracle does have a fighting chance in the infrastructure as a service area because of its huge installed base. In short, the company already has a lot of customers in place to sell their IaaS offerings to. In fact, according to Gartner, the company leads the pack as a database management vendor. Gartner estimates that the company counts more than four out of every 10 customers in the $36-billion industry. Oracle has a strong foothold in the SaaS space, as well.
The company is also banking on its cloud talent. Oracle has been on a hiring binge in the past few years, ensuring that they have the best people in place for their cloud offerings. For instance, Peter Magnusson who is the company’s vice president for cloud development was hired from Google. Meanwhile, another vice president, this time for engineering, Don Johnson used to work for Amazon and was instrumental in helping the retail giant build AWS.
However, infrastructure cloud is largely dominated by Amazon Web Services, along with Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.
Stronger physical presence
Oracle is not only beefing up on its cloud services; they are also expanding globally. The company has announced that it will open new offices in the UK, Turkey and Virginia. That means the company now has 29 regions all over the world.
Oracle is playing catch up, but it is following in the footsteps of both Microsoft and IBM in offering Iaas, SaaS and Paas. Take that and consider their currently huge base of potential customers and you could see the company succeeding as a cloud services vendor. On the other hand, other cloud computing services providers have an advantage in that Oracle’s own customers might be working with them already.
Oracle still needs to ensure that they have a better offering to make it easier for customers to switch to them for the cloud services that they may be getting from somewhere else.
If you are currently using Oracle products and would like to explore the company’s new cloud services, give Four Cornerstone a call at (817) 377-1144. We can help you evaluate Oracle’s cloud services thoroughly with our team of experts helping you figure out if the new cloud services are right for your operations. Four Cornerstone knows Oracle inside out – helped by our experienced team and years of working with the technology. Moreover, several companies trust us as their cloud services consultant. Call us today!
Photo courtesy of Rastin Mehr.
