Oracle Looks To Surpass Amazon In The IaaS Market

It seems another IT giant is weighing its options to jump into the cloud computing market. Oracle has announced its plans to expand into the $72 billion market.

Although representatives from Oracle made some announcements on the company’s plans of entering the cloud computing market earlier this year, on Monday Mark Hurd, the President of Oracle, announced more details on the matter.

It seems Oracle is looking to snatch some of the market share of the Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market. The market today is dominated by three major players: Amazon, IBM and Rackspace.

IaaS services are considered to be the subset of cloud computing services, which involve storage, software, applications and a number of other resources. On the contrary, infrastructure services only offer basic resources to the customers, which they can use to run their software programs or operating systems.

It is clear from what  Oracle president has shared that the company will take a different approach to IaaS than its competitors.

Instead of creating one large data center and storing all the customers’ data there, Oracle shall install its “engineered systems” on the customer’s site. The engineered system will be a high-end hardware installation loaded with Oracle software. This means customers won’t have to share their systems with others. Oracle will be charging a monthly fee for these services.

Rick Sherlund, someone who has observed Oracle for a very long time, thinks it is a very smart plan by the company. Rick says, “You’ve got [Salesforce.com CEO Marc] Benioff on the one hand, saying Oracle doesn’t get the cloud and Oracle saying hold on a second, a lot of mission-critical applications might be better behind the firewall, in a private cloud setting. In that environment, Oracle has a lot of strengths.”
This statement by Rick refers back to 2011 when Marc Benioff, CEO of salesforce.com said that Oracle’s products are like “the False Cloud”. And in response, Ellison termed salesforce.com as “the roach motel of clouds.”

Rick Sherlund defends Oracle when he says “Oracle can’t do what Salesforce.com has done and create multi-tenancy apps out of on-premise apps that were never designed for multi-tenancy.”

Experts believe that the new strategy by Oracle will be largely welcomed by its customers. In all fairness, companies are experimenting in the field of cloud computing, but still, there is no hard and fast rule for success in the market.

The cost breakdown of the new service offered by Oracle is such that customers won’t have to pay large sums of money upfront, but will cost them more in the long-run. This is very much like leasing, and it is expected to attract small-sized companies’ ? unable to make large investments.