Oracle Cloud: A generational shift in computing

Version 1 Cloud Architect Chris Hollies reports live from OpenWorld 2015.

Larry Ellison justifiably called the current industry move to cloud ‘a generational shift in computing’ in his opening keynote speech at Oracle Openworld (OOW) 2015 on Sunday afternoon.

It’s ten years since Oracle joined the SaaS revolution with their Fusion Applications programme, and a little over a year since they unveiled their initial PaaS offerings. For those reasons, Ellison correctly identifies that we are already deep into this generational shift.

Peter Magnusson, SVP at Oracle with responsibility for Public Cloud, told OOW 2015 this afternoon that global IT spend on IaaS will exceed 6B in 2015. To give that number some context, it represents a 33% growth over 2014 – evidence of the explosion in this sector. Now Oracle is in the vanguard of this IaaS space too.

Magnusson went on to introduce Diby Malakar, VP Product Management for IaaS, who gave us a deep dive into the Oracle Compute product, and called out some of the features which truly differentiate it in this space. The most significant may well be that the Oracle Cloud uses the exact same architecture, standards and products as those which customers currently use on-premise. Not only does this mean transparent migration between cloud and on-premise, but even the ability to perform such migrations with zero application downtime. Of course, it also embraces existing skillsets, meaning no steep learning curve for technicians and users at the sharp end.

Backed by 19 tier 4 data centres, Oracle Compute presents a paradigm shift in the ability of Enterprise customers to leverage cloud infrastructure.