It's the least wonderful time of the year in San Francisco: Oracle OpenWorld week. Without seasons to mark the passage of time out here in the Bay Area, complaining about the traffic caused by Oracle's massive event is an annual rite. And for many years, cloud computing reporters have amused themselves watching Oracle executives try to convince attendees that Oracle's bread-and-butter software is cloudy.
This year, Oracle put a little more meat behind its pitch.
As reported by Fortune, Oracle is getting into the public cloud business with a new infrastructure service that sounds pretty much like what AWS and Microsoft's Azure offer. There's elastic compute, storage, and even one of those container-as-a-service thingies.
It's not hard for a company with as much money and fight as Oracle to launch the components necessary to enter the public cloud market in serious fashion, but will potential customers bite? Given the success of AWS and Azure over the past year, it's hard to see how potential customers looking for places to put their applications would choose Oracle, which does not have the most customer-friendly reputation in enterprise tech.
Of course, Oracle doesn't really have much choice. By the time founder Larry Ellison decides he's tired of all this and would rather spend more time on his Hawaiian island, the tech industry will likely have passed a cloud tipping point, in which companies like AWS have become the titans that companies like Oracle, SAP, HP, and EMC used to be. No one wastes time trying to persuade people that the cloud is a fad anymore.
We've seen Dell and EMC join forces in an attempt to become the big corporation that can best sell cloud services to other big corporations. Oracle, which has often been seen as the cost of doing business in the information age rather than a transformative technology partner, made its bid this week to occupy that position.
