When it comes to cloud computing, everybody’s thoughts somehow tend to vary quite a bit; not just in terms of what future holds for us, but also with regard to role of hardware in the upgrades. Some of the corporate giants have banked on the fact that demand for cloud hosting would grow to an extent that even the small business owners would make a move to the cloud without second thoughts. Others feel that the uptrend may come down at some point in near future, and then further progress would depend upon a lot of other factors.
Oracle will be giving an important update on the company’s cloud strategy shortly, but it is being speculated that the approach adopted by the company will be extremely different from its core competitors.
The big news is that Oracle is planning to lock horns with Google, Microsoft and Amazon with its all-new cloud service and hardware is destined to be playing a vital role in its strategy.
And, now that’s some news, isn’t it? Well, the Chief Executive of Oracle, Larry Ellison, revealed the company’s plan on one of the earnings calls last week. He stated that their new IaaS service will provide secure, virtualized storage services on Oracle Cloud or it can be a similar infrastructure service that can be installed in the client’s data center and will be considered as private cloud managed by Oracle. The statement clearly suggests that Oracle wants all of its customers to make use of its software as well as its hardware for on-premise cloud purposes and also choose Oracle for public cloud; having said so, this may be easier said than done! It’s definitely hard to predict the complexity involved in the whole process, and only time will tell what kind of hiccups Oracle would encounter, over the coming months.
On the other hand, Microsoft is also trying its hand at something very similar with its updated Server and System Center software, which also connects to its own service of Azure cloud, but the company chose to steer clear of any hardware involvement.
AWS joined hands with on-premise cloud integration specialist, Eucalyptus and came up with its own service “Storage Gateway” to conveniently help its clients to move their data between its cloud and their kit; having said that, even AWS preferred to stay away from hardware. Google, another arch rival, has parted itself from the world of on-premises and its App Engine and Compute Engine are public-only services.
The only leading company that looks like trying something similar in this regard is HP. Its “Cloud Systems” have been around for over two years now. The pieces of compute and storage connect straight to the company’s OpenStack-based in-development, along with Savvis and AWS.
Now, there could be variety of reasons behind Google, Amazon, and MS not trying their luck with this approach; Amazon and Google have already got plenty of other products and services to focus on, whereas Microsoft has had its fair share of failure trying its hand at lot of newer things.
Of course, not one out of these firms have big hardware business as Oracle does, which became bigger after Sun’s acquisition. One important part of the company’s strategy is finding a role to play for its top end hardware in cloud, which is also often seen with lot of commodity hardware. So, it’d be interesting to see whether Oracle would put big money on hardware, and choose a path that hasn’t been considered by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and the likes of them… If and they choose to do so, then to what extent would they really manage to pull it off!