Oracle In Cloud Offensive As New Offerings Look To Compete With Amazon

“We’re prepared to compete with Amazon.com on price,” stated Oracle boss Larry Ellison on Monday.

With this declaration, Oracle, which sold $426m (£270m) worth of business in SaaS and PaaS last quarter, has now entered into the cloud computing race indefinitely.

24 new cloud services

The statement came in conjunction with a massive extension of the firm’s cloud offerings, with Oracle revealing it will be providing cloud storage and the ability to run Oracle apps wholly in the cloud, as well as the continuing shift its CRM business into the cloud.

The company announced 24 new cloud services in total, including a Database Cloud called Exadata,  Archive Storage Cloud, Big Data Cloud, Integration Cloud, Mobile Cloud, and Process Cloud.

“Oracle is the only company on the planet that can deliver a complete, integrated, standards-based suite of services at every layer of the cloud,” said Ellison.

“Those technology advantages enable us to be much more cost-effective than our competitors. Our new Archive Storage service goes head-to-head with Amazon Glacier and it’s one-tenth their price.”

Oracle’s Exadata service allows Oracle customers to run databases in the cloud with the same functionality as they would on-premises. Oracle databases rolled out in the cloud as part of this service are 100 percent compatible with those that are deployed on-premises, advised Oracle.

The Archive Storage Cloud Services is a “deep cloud” archive, according to the firm. It’s suited for infrequently accessed large-scale data sets, such as corporate financial records, medical and pharmaceutical archives, cultural preservation content, insurance records and digital film masters.

Ellison is confident in Oracle’s cloud abilities. He said that the last quarter’s sales for his company were an “industry record”, as no other company has ever sold that much in just one quarter.

But there is still much work to do before it can reach the heady heights of Amazon’s cloud success. According to latest financial figures, Oracle chowed through $2.3bn (£1.46bn) of revenue in cloud last year. Amazon, on the other hand, revealed that it hauled in around $6bn (£3.8bn) a year.

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