Cloud could deliver a silver lining for Oracle

Customers need to be able to manage this increased flow while also consolidating their information technology and reducing operating costs.

Hurd said Oracle was the only company that could address companies’ austerity and innovation agendas simultaneously.

At the heart of Oracle’s cloud services is its public cloud and private cloud offerings, which Oracle executives said would encourage companies to move to cloud computing by letting them start with transferring just one or two areas of their IT environment to the cloud.

Oracle will also provide, manage and run its private cloud infrastructure for clients, on their own premises.

“We’re the only cloud provider that gives you a choice of deployment,” said Ellison on Tuesday.

He said customers can test software and services in a public environment, then move them to private cloud infrastructure for reasons ranging from security or privacy concerns, or governance requirements.

According to analyst Gartner, some 78 per cent of enterprises are looking at developing a private cloud by 2014.

Ellison said he thought a good portion of Oracle customers currently running Fusion applications on the Oracle public cloud would migrate to private cloud.

The demand for private cloud services has been greater in North America, he said, but he expects it will be evenly split eventually with the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia Pacific regions.

He expected slightly stronger demand in the EMEA region than in Asia Pacific.

Oracle executive vice-president of product development Thomas Kurian said the majority of Oracle customers run a “hybrid cloud”, with some applications on their own systems and some on a public cloud.

The company also announced a new version of its flagship database product, to be called Oracle 12c (for cloud), which it says can consolidate numerous databases into a single database with many “virtual” component databases, for easier management in a cloud environment.

A new X3 version of its Exadata database machine runs databases in faster and more reliable semiconductor memory rather than disk-drive memory, significantly compresses data to reduce storage requirements and also runs 100 times faster than the previous X2 version, Ellison said.

Oracle’s major investment in this broad cloud portfolio has required it to build new data centres, said Abhay Parasnis, senior vice-president of Oracle Cloud.

“We are on a very aggressive rollout in terms of our global data centre footprint,” he said, noting Oracle was adding two more data centres in Europe to bring the worldwide total to 10.

Though primarily focused on large enterprises, Oracle hasn’t taken its eye off the mid-sized company market, which it defines as firms with fewer than 1,500 employees or below $500 million in sales revenue or operating budget.

Through its Accelerate programme, it makes the same products available to this vast mid-size businesses through the cloud, according to Steve Cox, vice-president of Oracle Accelerate.