Oracle Continues to Make Cloud Progress

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: James Staten.

Well if you’re going to make a dramatic about face from total dismissal of cloud computing, this is a relatively credible way to do it. Following up on its announcement of a serious cloud future at Oracle Open World 2011, the company delivered new cloud services with some credibility at this last week’s show. It’s a strategy with laser focus on selling to Oracle’s own installed base and all guns aimed at Salesforce.com.

While the promise from last year was a homegrown cloud strategy, most of this year’s execution has been bought. The strategy is essentially to deliver enterprise-class applications and middleware any way you want it – on-premise, hosted and managed or true cloud. A quick look at where they are and how they got here:…

* A real Software as a Service portfolio now – On the SaaS front, nearly all of Oracle’s new announcements were the integration of its myriad SaaS acquisitions in 2011-2012 – social sites, business intelligence, marketing services, etc. They are basically filling out a portfolio of SaaS services that include its Oracle Fusion Applications. So now, what about the legacy applications – when will they move these to SaaS? Customers shouldn’t wait around for Oracle to migrate its older, on-premise applications to the cloud; there’s no clear roadmap for that to happen. What Forrester clients should count on, are new generation SaaS applications that eventually will replace the on-premise predecessors. Oracle’s fast path to SaaS is through M&A, so despite the remarks from Oracle’s CFO Safra Catz last week, Oracle clearly isn’t done buying its way into the cloud space. Not by a long shot…

Read more from the source @ http://www.zdnet.com/oracle-continues-to-make-cloud-progress-7000005574/