Ellison debuts Oracle Cloud – rebadged strategy of 100+ hosted apps

"We're eating a lot of our own dog food and it tastes great," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (pictured) as he presented "Oracle Cloud", which he has trailed as a comprehensive B2B and B2C cloud computing strategy for the enterprise vendor.

The "announcement" of what Oracle says is 100+, standards-based applications running in the cloud completes one of the largest and boldest marketing u-turns in IT history. Ellison called the cloud "modern computing".

However, Oracle Cloud presents little that is genuinely new for the vendor (beyond the support elements presented by Mark Hurd). It is essentially the culmination of the seven-year Project Fusion programme to make Oracle applications available either on-premise or as a hosted solution on Oracle terms.

In other words, after years of dismissing the cloud as "water vapour" plus rented hardware – running Oracle databases, no doubt – Ellison has done the inevitable and renamed the cloud after Oracle.

"We are not trying to be a niche vendor with one, two, three applications in the cloud," said Ellison in a bravado performance that slammed Workday and SAP, among others. ("SAP have got nothing except SuccessFactors. We can't beat them if they don't show up.")

He said: "We are providing a complete CRM suite, a complete suite for ERP, and a complete suite for human capital management... by far the most comprehensive suite of applications running in the cloud by any vendor anywhere in the world."

Its social relationship management focus is already apparent from the recent purchases of Vitrue and Collective Intellect, which Ellison said would allow companies to use social media to communicate with customers proactively.

The social acquisitions this week also suggest that there has been no let-up in the traditional Oracle business model of buying first and worrying about integration later. Many of the Oracle Cloud components are recent buys, such as talent management suite Taleo, for example. Being Ellison, Oracle Cloud is also the cloud on different terms to everyone else.

"We think a modern cloud lets you decide when you want to upgrade, not have the cloud vendor tell you when you upgrade to the next version of the software,” he said.
"We're going to give you a window... within that window, you decide when you want to move towards that version of the software. We don't decide for you."

However, as our recent analysis of Oracle's core licensing models and attitude to the cloud discussed [updated to include these annoucements], not everything is quite as clear-cut as Ellison makes out. Ellison also said that virtualisation is at the core of the refocused Oracle project. "We think a modern cloud is virtualised. We think a modern cloud does not mix your data with your competitors' data."

• Oracle's longstanding battle with Salesforce.com for mindshare and column inches took on a new dimension shortly before Ellison took to the stage at 9pm UK time. Ever the (rival) showman, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff tweeted, "Welcome President Obama to Salesforce.com, San Francisco's biggest and fastest growing technology company." The US president was due to meet Benioff at the company's Market Street HQ as Ellison made his presentation – one reason, perhaps, for Ellison's more moderate tone about his Cloud rival.