Oracle has extended its cloud platform with a Database Cloud for Exadata, Archive Storage Cloud, Big Data Cloud, Integration Cloud, Mobile Cloud, and Process Cloud add-ons.
Oracle claims its archiving cloud is significantly cheaper than Amazon Web Services' (AWS) rival offering.
The company has also targeted SAP Hana with its Database Cloud offering, which provides Exadata – its analytics appliance – as a service.
While SAP customers could run Oracle as the back-end database for their enterprise resource planning (ERP), Hana offers an in-memory alternative. Oracle claims its in-memory database is a superior product to Hana, but with SAP's S/4Hana ERP, there is no need for customers to buy Oracle database licences to run their SAP ERP.
'Stunningly profitable' cloud services
The company is heavily pushing its cloud platform. Last week, Oracle stated cloud software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) revenues of $416m – showing 29% growth – in its fourth quarter (Q4) results.
During its Q4 earnings call Ellison boasted to Wall Street analysts that SaaS and PaaS would be "stunningly profitable" for Oracle.
IDC analyst recently noted that one of the big IT benefits of using a platform as a service is that it provides a self-service environment for access to development and deployment tools, while business users regards SaaS integration as the top benefit.
According to Robert Mahowald, program vice-president of cloud software at IDC: "Having a full-service PaaS platform alongside a complete applications portfolio satisfies both needs, and users of the Oracle Cloud Platform benefit from access to the robust application development and deployment, data management, big data analytics, integration, and mobile capabilities, satisfying the key IT and line-of-business needs."
Oracle said its cloud Exadata Service brings the full power of the Oracle Exadata database platform to the cloud.
The archive cloud is designed for workloads that require long-term retention at the lowest price in the industry. Oracle said the Archive Storage Cloud would be suited for infrequently-accessed large datasets, such as corporate financial records, medical and pharmaceutical archives, cultural preservation content, insurance records and digital film masters.
