Computerworld

​INSIGHT: Oracle’s Ellison heralds a generational shift in computing

“Oracle has gone all in for the cloud over the last 12 months, and its portfolio is impressive."
Larry Ellison - Executive Chairman, Oracle

Larry Ellison - Executive Chairman, Oracle

Kicking off Oracle OpenWorld with his traditional keynote, Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison asserted that the industry is in the early stages of a generational shift in computing.

This, as the tech veteran put it, comes as customers transition to a true utility model, with infrastructure, platform, and application tiers all delivered from the Cloud over a global network.

Ellison claimed that Oracle and Microsoft are the only two companies operating across all three cloud tiers, while other competitors (both new and traditional) lack at least one component.

As described by Ovum Research Analyst Tim Jennings, Ellison talked at length about the key design principles that underpin Oracle’s cloud effort.

“They include lowest cost of ownership, fault tolerance, high performance, a standards-based approach, compatibility between cloud and on-premise, and high security,” Jennings says.

Building on these themes, Oracle made several new announcements, including new manufacturing and e-commerce SaaS applications, Oracle Database 12c Release 2 improvements, a new Exadata Cloud service, and additions to the company’s extensive cloud platform services portfolio.

“Oracle has gone all in for the cloud over the last 12 months, and its portfolio is impressive,” Jennings adds.

“The challenge to move beyond the early stages of transition will lie less in competitive threats, and more in selling customers the message that the proposition is now sufficiently mature to make their own bets.”