Oracle’s said its new infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud computing initiative is aimed squarely at market leader Amazon Web Services LLC, but its strategy appears to take a page from a more traditional competitor – IBM.

Oracle’s announcement this morning stressed the value of bare-metal cloud servers that the company claimed are more than 11 times faster and 20 percent cheaper than the fastest solution offered by the competition. It also emphasize that cloud computing isn’t a drag-and-drop option for most enterprises.

Organizations, “can’t simply abandon all of their existing IT practices and move all workloads to a multi-tenant cloud world,” Oracle said in a comment aimed squarely at Amazon, which has largely eschewed a hybrid cloud strategy.

Oracle described Bare Metal Cloud Services are described as a “high-scale public cloud offering…in a fully virtualized network environment” that delivers database-as-service, network block storage, object storage and virtual network connectivity that makes bare-metal servers in the cloud effectively an extension of customers’ on-premise network. Oracle will provide for direct connectivity between compute and storage nodes, the company said.

The bare-metal services will also interoperate with the existing Oracle Cloud Platform to ease migration from on-premise to cloud services. However, Oracle is not alone in provisioning physical servers in the cloud. IBM’s SoftLayer subsidiary has had a similar offering for several years, and IBM wasted no time in issuing a statement noting that fact.

“Although late to the game and woefully behind in the bare-metal race, Oracle is finally throwing its hat in the ring,” the company said in a statement, adding that IBM’s 48 data centers in 18 countries are an additional benefit rivals can’t match.

Without naming IBM specifically, Oracle said its bare-metal servers are up to 10 times as fast as competing offerings at a lower prices. It did not specify pricing, however.

Easier VMware migration

Oracle further fattened its hybrid cloud portfolio with a new service that sprang from its February acquisition of cloud hypervisor provider Ravello Systems Inc. The Oracle Ravello Cloud Service enables organizations to move VMware Inc. and kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) workloads unchanged from on-premise servers to the cloud.  The migration requires no VM conversion, application reconfiguration or networking changes and provides for layer 2 and layer 3 switching support, Oracle said.

The company also introduced a container option with similar functionality. Oracle Container Cloud Service provides a Docker-compatible way to deploy application stacks in containers easily. The service provides for registry integration, application orchestration, application scheduling and service scaling capabilities.

All of these hybrid options are supported by a new network service that provides for fast and secure connections between on-premise data centers in the cloud. Oracle FastConnect includes and IPsec VPN along with multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) for quick peering.

SaaS options get smarter

Oracle also outlined enhancements to its software-as-a-service (SaaS) that stress machine learning and integration with Oracle Data Cloud, which is a collection of more than five billion anonymized consumer and business profiles spanning 45,000 attributes. Adaptive Intelligent Applications will be aimed at corporate disciplines such as sales and human resources, providing a machine learning model that “adapt and learn.” Over time, these intelligent applications will offer individualized recommendations based upon the customer’s environment and behavior, Oracle said.

Among the new applications, announced today are:

• Oracle Engagement Cloud combines Oracle’s sales and service capabilities with sales automation, service request management, knowledge management and customer self-service to enable sales and service professionals to work from a single screen.
• Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close (FCCS) Cloud is aimed at chief financial officers. It enables them to quickly communicate financial results to internal and external stakeholders, consolidate operating results of an acquired business to help ensure compliance, and scale globally without a need to re-implement core financial processes or systems.
• Oracle Revenue Management Cloud increases visibility into the status and value of contracts, delivers compliant revenue recognition, and creates configurable and auditable revenue entries that are compliance with recent accounting standards like ASC 606 and IFRS 15. The service is a new component in Oracle’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) Cloud suite.

Enhancements to Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud provide additional support for healthcare management and contractual terms that enable customers to define eligibility rules for benefits, absence, time, and labor and payroll. Improvements to the Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud enable increased flexibility, reduced costs, and improved performance and visibility across the business.