Larry Ellison, the hard-charging co-founder and technology visionary of enterprise software giant Oracle, gave an expectant capacity crowd plenty to get excited about at his opening keynote of Oracle OpenWorld 2014 in San Francisco. This year marks “an inflection point” for Oracle, he told the standing-room only group of more than 11,000, “a turning point, really” in terms of the company’s delivery on its promise to innovate in every aspect of cloud computing.
Ellison, who is 70 and recently stepped down as Oracle’s CEO to become executive chairman and chief technology officer, recounted the history of the company’s hard-won relationships with its customers across 30 years, then cracked wise about its ability to stay competitive. “How do we look—a dinosaur, yes or no?” he asked rhetorically.
Ellison began his session by alluding to Oracle’s decades-long commitment to allowing customers to update their applications to next-generation platforms without having to rewrite a single line of code. He closed by saying that ensuring the security of new and future cloud services will be “job one here at Oracle, and that's the promise we make you for the next 30 years.”
This year, in particular, “we’ve been very, very busy” Ellison said, pointing to three areas of cloud services where Oracle has expended considerable effort and investment.
In terms of cloud applications, or SaaS (Software as a Service), Oracle has “the largest portfolio of applications [in the cloud] of anybody,” Ellison said. He discussed the company’s work moving industrial-strength ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications to the cloud, claiming the technology high ground there. “We are the first mover in this space, and we are continually adding products,” he said.
Oracle has been catching up to rival Salesforce.com in sales cloud applications—despite its rival’s 15-year head start, he said. At the same time, Oracle’s human capital management suite, which incorporates “core HR,” or enterprise-level human resources capabilities, is an industry leader, Ellison said, in particular because “our HCM is tightly coupled with our social tools.”
Throughout his speech Ellison drove home that point, that Oracle’s cloud offerings incorporate advanced capabilities, especially for social networking and mobile computing.
For example, when it comes to providing customers with a cloud-based application development environment—what’s known as platform as a service (PaaS)—Ellison was enthusiastic about his company’s progress in building up its platform. He pointed to multitenancy, high-speed analytics, and social and mobile capabilities that “endow apps with modernity,” which customers will make use of automatically when they employ the cloud service.
As expected, Oracle is making available its flagship Oracle Database 12c as a cloud service, which Ellison predicts will become the company’s most significant cloud offering. “Our ISVs have been waiting for this, our customers have been waiting for this,” he said.
The enterprise database as a cloud service means customers can migrate any of their Oracle applications and databases to its cloud “with the push of a button,” Ellison said. That, and more: “Not only does it get moved but it gets modernized,” he said.
Ellison also talked about a third area of enterprise cloud services, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which gives customers access to compute resources (including virtualization) and data storage capacity over the Internet. Ellison said Oracle would make its IaaS as low-cost as any of its competitors. “Our job is to do [IaaS] with better security and better reliability at the same price,” Ellison said.
Ellison emphasized the extent of Oracle’s cloud infrastructure, which includes 30,000 computers and 400 petabytes of data supporting 62 million users a day. “Our cloud is bigger than people think, and it’s going to get a lot bigger,” Ellison predicted.
He talked about several new and upcoming products from Oracle, including an automated real-time data backup system called Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance (Ellison joked that he’s particularly happy with that product name, having coined it himself and made it stick before his job change), an enterprise flash-storage network device called FS1 Flash Storage System, and the latest version of Oracle’s SPARC chip, the M7.
Oracle inherited the SPARC processor when it acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010, and Ellison pointed with pride to the specific innovations incorporated in the most recent iteration of the chip. Enhancements include what Oracle calls “software in silicon,” software functionality that is hardwired into the processor, such as database query acceleration and data decompression, both of which serve to speed up application processing significantly.
Another “software in silicon” innovation is known as memory protection, a security feature in the processor that prevents unknown malware from wreaking havoc. Ellison referred to it as “the most important piece of engineering we’ve done in security in a very, very long time.”
That feature is so important because security is a priority for customers as they move their applications and data to the cloud. "Security has been in our blood for a very, very long time," Ellison said, referring to the company’s early history working with the CIA and the NSA. "It’s very important we have that heritage moving into the cloud."
