As my East Coast friends say, “Let me ask you this.”
So, let me ask you this: how cloudy is Oracle now? How much of a consequential PaaS has the company made at the market? Is this a bold new vision, or will the company again be accused of cloudwashing and/or putting old wine into new bottles?
Email me or tweet me with your opinions. At the moment, I’m getting some industry opinion on background.
This we know: Oracle’s newly minted CTO Larry Ellison is taking the cloud seriously. Referring to the company’s official announcements this week, he said in public that Oracle is not just a SaaS like Salesforce and not just an IaaS like Amazon. He also alleges that no other company can match Oracle’s PaaS throughout the stack.
Enterprise IT is a multi-trillion-dollar market worldwide, with a graveyard littered by formerly mighty technology companies. Larry Ellison himself warned of industry consolidation years ago, with the observation that the future of Silicon Valley may be that of Detroit.
I doubt he was drawing this analogy far enough to mean that Japanese, German, and Korean cars were going to almost fatally wound American companies. But he was clearly of the mind that no company is secure forever, and he intended his company to be sure everyone else is more insecure than him.
To me, it seems as if this early discussion of Oracle’s apparent new strategy is its focus on public cloud. It also seems as if the term “public cloud” may be headed for history’s dustbin, as more of us think in terms of onsite and offsite rather than public and private, with some sort of hybrid emerging at large enterprises.
Marten Mickos drew a skillful analogy between cloud and beer for us, just before he was tapped as HP’s new cloud leader through the acquisition of Eucalyptus.
But let me ask you this: what do you think?