Larry Ellison kicked off Oracle Openworld on Sunday with a typically engaging presentation, which focused largely, as we all expected, on Oracle’s cloud offerings.

The key messages from Ellison were that the IT industry is in the middle of a paradigm shift where more and more companies will be putting more and more services in the Cloud, and that Oracle has evolved its offerings from the original SaaS catalog, to PaaS offerings, and now a full IaaS capability.

Ellison outlined the following key design goals of the Oracle Public Cloud:

• Oracle Cloud Design Goals
  • Lowest acquisition price
    • Oracle plan to match or beat AWS
    • Automation / elimination of human error
    • Productivity increases and management costs decrease
  • Fault tolerance
    • n+1 architecture across the board
  • Fastest Database / Middleware / Applications / Analytics
    • Evolution of storing more of your data in a high speed format on a high speed device with every release
    • Row-format data evolves to Columnar
    • Disk storage evolves to PCIe-attached flash
  • Standards baked in
    • Open standards (SQL, Hadoop, Java, Ruby, etc) provide portability between various cloud vendors
    • This is good for the customer, but means Oracle need to focus on customer satisfaction to avoid churn!
  • Compatibility / portability
    • Manage private and public clouds as a single estate
    • Portability between on-premise and cloud
  • Security – always-on continuous defense
    • Security in silicon
    • Latest patches are always applied
    • Data encryption always-on in the cloud

In addition to the general Cloud goals, Ellison covered many new application-related cloud services, but for those of us from a database background there were a few interesting (and long-awaited) nuggets to add:

• Oracle Database 12cR2
  • Due in 2016
  • Includes many new capabilities, including expanded multitenancy
• Oracle Exadata Cloud Services
  • Exadata in the Cloud, with all software options enabled for one metered price
  • Includes In-memory database and in-flash database
• Big Data offerings
  • Oracle Big Data Preparation Cloud Service
  • Oracle Big Data Discovery Cloud Service

These items were only touched on at a very high level, so we look forward to learning more as the week progresses!

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Written by the Cintra Architect Team – October 2015