Oracle leaps into the cloud game too

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison famously said in 2008, “Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?”

He was referring to the term “cloud computing”, which he said was silly, since it described something that companies were already doing. He promised back then to make some sort of Oracle “cloud computing” pronouncement, and so he has finally done.

On Wednesday, Ellison unveiled Oracle’s public cloud service which will run on the company’s Fusion software. Well, what he really unveiled was a new functionality that would allow businesses to access custom-built applications, or those crafted by Fusion, via the internet. That category of software is known as cloud.

“Our cloud's a little bit different. It's both platform as a service and applications as a service,” Ellison said OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. “The key part is that our cloud is based on industry standards and supports full interoperability with other clouds. Just because you go to the cloud doesn't mean you forget everything about information technology from the past 20 years.”

Ellison had unkind words about other cloud services, especially salesforce.com, calling it the “roach motel” of cloud services.

We wouldn’t expect any less from the famously tactless Larry Ellison. DM

Read more:

• Ellison unveils new cloud in PC World;


• Ellison embraces cloud craze in Wall Street Journal.

Photo: REUTERS