Oracle's Public Cloud unveiled
As Larry Ellison continues Saleforce.com spat with 'roach motel' dig...
Oracle chief Larry Ellison described Salesforce.com's technology as "the roach motel of clouds"Photo: Oracle PR
Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison has unveiled a host of cloud offerings from the database giant, while also taking a swipe at cloud rival Salesforce.com.
The Oracle Public Cloud, announced on Wednesday, provides access to Oracle's Fusion Applications suite, Fusion Middleware and the Oracle database, managed, hosted and supported by Oracle. The Public Cloud also features Fusion services including CRM and human capital management, as well as the Oracle Social Network and its Java and Database cloud services.
The Public Cloud will be elastic - meaning users can scale up or down the computing resources they use according to demand - much in the same way as Amazon's EC2.
The Oracle Public Cloud will be made available to customers in the coming weeks.
"Our cloud is based on industry standards. You can move your data between our cloud, someone else's cloud, to your datacentre and back and forth and back again," CEO Larry Ellison said.
"Just because you go to the cloud, it doesn't mean you forget everything you've learned about information security over the last 20 years - [you don't say], 'We don't need standards, we don't need interoperability, this is the cloud'," he said.
In contrast, he said - continuing the ongoing spat with Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff - Salesforce.com's technology is "kind of sticky - it's the ultimate vendor lock-in," adding: "You can check in, but you can't check out. I like to think of it as the roach motel of clouds."
Oracle's Public Cloud will use a monthly subscription model and single tenancy - the model where each user's data is stored separately.
"We think [multi-tenancy] is a really bad idea, unless you want to look at your competitors' leads. It's a very bad security model," according to Ellison.
Not everyone agrees, however. Benioff of Salesforce - which uses a multi-tenancy model - said: "Multi-tenancy is the foundation of the industry. You see it in the technology we use every day - in Twitter, in Google, in Larry's company Netsuite [Ellison has an investment in Netsuite] and our company."
"When you open a bank account, do they open a new server for you?" he said. "No, they use a shared database."
Along with the Public Cloud, Ellison used his keynote to unveil Oracle Social Network - an enterprise social networking tool that will be baked into Oracle's Fusion Applications.
The social networking tool will allow users to connect with and follow each other - such as on Facebook and Twitter - as well as follow updates on projects directly from their activity stream, and share information and documents.