As expected, at this year’s OpenWorld, Oracle announced Oracle Public Cloud (OPC). While the company is not as late to the public cloud party as you might think, considering that it had more time to prepare than most of its competitors, OPC could have been bolder.
The company remains well within its comfort zone. Nonetheless, it is a positive step forward that will boost market confidence in the notion of public cloud and enables Oracle to provide its customer base with a familiar set of options.
Part of a complete approach to cloud computing that spans private, public, and hybrid clouds, OPC is a broad offering that includes software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) on top of Oracle’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) software and hardware technology.e (OFC) and Oracle Fusion HCM Cloud Service (OFH) will be available from the OPC self-service portal to start with. Other modules will follow later.
They also include the Oracle Social Network Cloud Service (OSN), based on Oracle WebCenter, which injects social networking features into Oracle Fusion Applications. OSN can also be used outside of Oracle Fusion Applications.
The PaaS components include Oracle Database Cloud Service (OD), which makes the capabilities of Oracle Database available as a public cloud service, and Oracle Java Cloud Service (OJ), which is essentially Oracle WebLogic Server available as a public cloud service. OD and OJ are currently based on release 11g of the corresponding on-premise software. Ovum expects other Oracle Fusion middleware components, such as business process management, to follow.
The Oracle website provides an overview of what OPC is going to deliver, and the opportunity to enter an email address to get updates on OPC’s evolution. There is no self-service access to OFC or OFH, despite them being officially available and already used by customers.