(borrowed from @oracledatabase‘s Tweet today)
Today, the Oracle cloud world received some interesting news related to a new offering revealed at Oracle’s CloudWorld event. Part of a service called Oracle Cloud at Customer, this new cloud offering is a combined hardware and software engineered system called “cloud machine“, also referred to as “cloud on-prem” (an awesome but highly confusing oxymoron). My Oracle friends are calling it by its more popular term “private cloud”.
In truth, this is not a new announcement – the cloud machine was originally announced last year at Oracle OpenWorld but was called “private cloud machine” then. However, that announcement didn’t ring as many bells as it did today. Here are a few of the online articles written in response to this announcement:
What do EPM/BI folks need to know about it?
Well, not much for now…but it will be interesting to see how the configuration of this box changes in the future.
The Oracle cloud machine appeals to customers who want to connect to Oracle’s cloud offerings but within their own private network. This is accomplished by placing the box inside the customer’s own firewall and data center. However, Oracle takes care of all of the heavy lifting as with their other public cloud offerings by maintaining the hardware, software upgrades & patches, and server installations. It’s expected that Oracle will handle the hardware monitoring and software patches and upgrades remotely. The server installation will be completed onsite by Oracle Cloud Operations.
Right now the cloud software suites available on these boxes will include IaaS (“Infrastructure as a service”) and PaaS (“Platform as a service”). However, PaaS will be limited to only the following (=no EPM/BI cloud products):
- Java Cloud Service
- Integration Cloud Service
- *Database Cloud Service
- *Messaging Cloud Service
- *Application Container Cloud Service
*Indicates those services listed as “coming soon”, with more to be added later…
What’s amazing is that customers can expect to pay subscription pricing consistent with the current public cloud licensing models.
As the Wall Street Journal article reports, a couple of customers have been part of the beta testing process for months with no differences to report. The three machine configurations and list of known caveats can be found on Wikibon’s website here.
Because PaaS is included now, I’m curious if this means that BICS, DVCS, and potentially the future releases of EssCS (Essbase Cloud Service) and DMCS (Dimension Management Cloud Service) are candidates for this offering in the future. I’ll keep my ears to the ground.
Who will buy it?
Based on initial speculation, highly regulated companies with legal compliance requirements, a need for data control, privacy, and location preferences will want to be on the waiting list. It also gives interested companies the benefit of writing off the subscription as an OpEx cost rather than a CapEx cost.
What’s next for this offering?
From what I’m reading, this new offering attempts to place Oracle cloud one step above their major cloud competitors: Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. Oracle is still struggling to be recognized as a top contender in the cloud world. However, things are changing. Dave Vellante (CEO of SiliconANGLE Media) stated in an interview from today’s Oracle CloudWorld event that it is expected that Oracle “is going to surpass a billion dollars very soon” with cloud. In addition, Oracle will count revenue from their new cloud machine in its overall cloud numbers. Therefore, in this blue ocean known as cloud, we can should expect to see a breakthrough for Oracle in the future.
Oracle’s official cloud machine page can be found here: https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/cloudmachine?resolvetemplatefordevice=true&tabID=1385171146006
The current datasheet can be found here: http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/cloud/oracle-cloud-machine-ds-2949541.pdf
woman in epm 