Larry Ellison just announced that Oracle was launching a brand new cloud computing service.
Oracle will now be offering "infrastructure as a service" as the industry calls it, or "hardware as a service" as Ellison dubbed it tonight. He was speaking during the opening keynote of the company's annual OpenWorld conference being held in San Francisco this week.
For a guy that once called cloud computing "complete gibberish," he's now offering clouds in every way they can be offered: software-as-a-service (where companies pay monthly to use an app over the Internet), platform-as-a-service (where companies pay monthly to have someone else host their apps, typically custom-developed apps) and infrastructure-as-a-service (where companies rent all of the hardware, can set it up the way they want, and use it to host whatever apps they want.)
There are two versions of Oracle's new IaaS cloud. One is a "public cloud" similar to the kind of clouds offered by Amazon, Rackspace, HP, and others, where the hardware is located in Oracle's data centers. It includes compute services and storage services, Ellison said.
The second is the so-called Oracle Private cloud, where a replica of Oracle's public cloud is put in the customer's own data center. Oracle would still own the hardware and be responsible for running it, securing it and updating it.
"We own it. We manage it. We upgrade it. You only pay for what you use," Ellison told attendees.
Oracle isn't the only company offering private clouds. HP, IBM and lots of others do the same.
Oracle's selling point over the competition is that it's using exactly the same hardware and software in its private cloud as it uses in its public cloud. That would be its Exalogic and Exadata computers. These have been specifically designed to host Oracle's software and database.
The two new cloud services were part of four big announcements Ellison made on Sunday night.
The third announcement was that Oracle invented a brand new kind of database, designed specifically for the cloud. It's dubbed Oracle 12c (the c stands for cloud) and it let's multiple companies share the same database. Or a company with many Oracle databases can use 12c to easily consolidate all them onto one set of server/storage hardware. The Oracle 12c database will be available in 2013.
The fourth announcement was for a new hardware product that is a direct competitor to rival SAP's HANA database. Ellison introduced Exadata x3 and says that it will be bigger and faster than HANA, as well as rival server products from IBM and HP but that it will cost far less. Exadata x3 prices start at $200,000.
"If you talk to an Oracle salesperson, you can get a better price than that. I know these guys and gals and they are always ready to deal," Ellison promised.
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