Monday, September 19, 2016

Oracle 12.2 available on cloud first

“Amazon’s lead is over. Amazon is going to have serious competition going forward. And we’re very proud of our second generation of Infrastructure as a Service. We’re going to be focusing on it and aggressively featuring it not only during Oracle OpenWorld but for the remainder of this fiscal year and next fiscal year and the year after that.” said Oracle Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison in his opening keynote presentation at Oracle OpenWorld 2016.
  
What about Oracle’s new second-generation datacenters? According to Larry, it will offer twice as many cores as Amazon, twice as much memory as Amazon, 4 times as much storage as Amazon, and more than 10 times the I/O capacity of Amazon. Not only that, in order to get your order, Larry also promised you will pay less (than that paid to Amazon).

Is Oracle still a database company? Yes. It still sells its Oracle databases including Oracle Database 12c Release 2, aka, Oracle 12.2. But this time, Larry told the audience, “You will see as we develop features for the cloud, we’ll also start delivering our software in the cloud first. Clearly it’s going to go on-premises, but the first deployment of our database and a lot of our software now is going to go to the cloud first.”No surprise, the latest release Oracle 12.2 was officially announced to be first made available in the cloud. By checking Oracle website, there is no schedule yet for the on-premises version.

As I mentioned in my another article, Oracle has been working hard to convince customers to move to the cloud. Under current strategy, it makes sense for Oracle to attract more customers especially new ones into its cloud service. With its new push into IaaS market against Amazon, Oracle will need more applications and software running on its powerful and cheap infrastructure including its own latest software like Oracle 12c database. By doing this, Oracle will not only demonstrate the new software’s features and functions, but also fully test and fix its new software before shipping its on-premises version.

If your company has used Oracle Exadata machine, you know Oracle had developed “secret sauce” (software function) just for its own hardware to gain more performance. We can then expect Oracle to run its own software much better on its own cloud infrastructure than on other cloud platforms like Amazon.

However, the majority of Oracle’s revenue still came from its non-cloud business. Unlike Amazon, who generated its cloud business revenue from zero (without any legacy non-cloud IT services), Oracle might experience some sort of pain when cloud service eating some of its existing business.

No choice. Amazon is there, so is Microsoft. Larry knows he has to win in the cloud. “Oracle competes at all three levels of the cloud, all three tiers of the cloud.” he said in his keynote speech.

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