Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to prove skeptics wrong

[Preamble: I have been invited by  GestaltIT as a delegate to their TechFieldDay from Oct 17-19, 2018 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation are covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote their technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

The much maligned Oracle Cloud is getting a fresh reboot, starting with their Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and significant enhancements and technology updates were announced at the Oracle Open World this week. I had the privilege to hear about Oracle Cloud’s new attack plan when they presented at Tech Field Day 17 last week.

Oracle Cloud has not have the best of days in recent months. Thomas Kurian’s resignation as their President of Product Development was highly publicized in a disagreement with CTO and founder, Larry Ellison over cloud software strategy. Then there was an on-going lawsuit about how Oracle was misrepresenting their cloud revenue growth, which puts Oracle in a bad light.

On the local front here in Malaysia, I have heard from the grapevine of the aggressive nature of Oracle personnel pushing partners and customers to adopt their cloud services using legal scare tactics on their database licensing. A buddy of mine, who was previously the cloud business development manager at CTC Global, also shared Oracle’s cloud shortcomings compared to Amazon Web Service and Microsoft Azure a year ago.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure team aimed to turnover the bad perceptions, starting with the delegates of Tech Field Day 17, including yours truly.Their strategy was clear. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure runs the highest performance and the highest enterprise grade Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), bar none. Unlike the IBM Cloud, which in my opinion is a wishy-washy cloud service platform, Oracle Cloud’s ambition is solid.

They did a demo on JDEdwards EnterpriseOne application, and they continue to demonstrate their prowess running the highest performance computing experience ever, for all enterprise-grade workload. And that enterprise pedigree is clear.

Just this week, Amazon Prime Day had an outage. Amazon is in the process of weaning Oracle database from their entire ecosystem by 2020, and this outage clearly showed that the Oracle database and the enterprise applications would only run best on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

The OCI team presented several pieces, and I have included 2 of the 4 videos of the Oracle session.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Overview and Enterprise Application Case Studies from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.

Oracle Cloud Native and Big Data Application on Oracle Cloud Demo from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.

After the Tech Field Day video sessions have ended, we were presented with embargoed information of more of what Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will deliver in the coming weeks. The announcement is coming at the end of October 2018.

I was impressed with Oracle’s willingness to break the mould of the classic cloud service provider. They have developed several infrastructure ecosystems from ground up, including storage platforms. They have read the market; they have seen what worked and what didn’t with the classic cloud services providers like AWS, Azure or Google Cloud; they are willing to break their legacy to do what’s best for their customers. And they are leveraging what they are best at – The Enterprise – and putting it into the Oracle Cloud. Coming in late into the cloud computing game may have its benefits.

I am sure they have worked very hard to this point. The announcement at Oracle Open World this week included these updates:

• Security Enhancements: Oracle extended its commitment to provide cloud customers core-to-edge security by introducing new integrated security solutions to combat sophisticated cyber threats with layers of defense. The new cloud services include a Key Management Service (KMS) that allows customers to control the encryption of their data, an integrated Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), which monitors and enforces secure configurations, a Web Application Firewall (WAF) designed to protect against attacks on web traffic, and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection to help stop malicious actors from disrupting customer applications.
• Upgrade to Autonomous Database: Oracle is previewing new capabilities with dedicated Oracle Exadata cloud infrastructure for the latest version of Oracle Autonomous Database cloud service, Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP). Running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, ATP allows the line of business or development teams to each have their applications or development projects deployed in a fully dedicated ‘private cloud like environment’ on Oracle Cloud.
• Openness: To support its commitment to openness, and with expanding relationships with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), Oracle is announcing it has joined the Internet Society (ISOC) and Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2Coalition). Oracle will be a key member of these internet infrastructure community organizations to drive forward global internet policy and educational programs, as well as joining various working groups and industry events.
• Enterprise Expertise: Oracle announced a new integrated experience for partners and customers that makes it easier for them to publish and deploy business applications from Oracle Cloud Marketplace on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
• Mission-Critical Performance: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure continues to deliver customers with the performance required of today’s most mission-critical workloads. Oracle Cloud has beat out competitors in recent testing around performance. Combined with simple and scalable pricing, Oracle is leading the market in price and performance.

And I am sure Oracle will continue to gain more real estate of the cloud as they move forward with the right moves. I can see them ready to prove their skeptics wrong, and I can see them having a bright future as they expand to the rest of the world.

NOTE:

• Also check out fellow delegate, Enrico Signoretti’s blog –> Oracle Cloud, Better than You Might Think.