Oracle has just injected some powerful new capabilities into its Oracle Enterprise Manager software in yet another sign that it’s waking up to the money-spinning possibilities of the cloud.

The update – Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4 – allows organizations to offer a database-as-a-service which comes with features like disaster recovery and high availability. Like many of Oracle’s other main products, the update is representative of the company’s decision to embrace concepts like cloud-based services and multi-tenancy that it used to denounce.

Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4 also brings advancements in middleware management and access control, giving enterprises the ability to consumer their databases in a robust and agile environment.

Dan Koloski, senior director of product management for the Oracle Enterprise Manager line of software said the release focuses on three key aspects – cloud automation, enterprise-grade management and stack management, which should allow its customers to use the cloud for mission-critical applications.

One particular feature that stands out, from a developers’ perspective, is the JVM Diagnostics-as-a-service component. This adds the ability to test pre-production apps for common problems in JVM, such as heap errors. This means organizations should be able to spot underlying problems before they fire up their apps, preventing serious failures.

We try to use these upfront visualizations with selective drilldown to make it human consumable,” said Koloski in an interview with The Register. “Our approach with JVMD is we’re trying to simplify wherever possible. We can essentially say to a less sophisticated consumer ‘here’s the way we would troubleshoot this problem’.” In any case, the feature will be most welcome for developers tasked with troubleshooting JVM-based issues in apps.

Another bonus is the release can also ease the process of deploying Oracle 12C database through Oracle Enterprise Manager. There’s also an updated overview of Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c, the latest iteration of Oracle’s enterprise Java application support tool.

Finally, Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4 comes with some enhanced security features to ensure the new functionality doesn’t cause any issues. These include a new security console that allows auditing of the manager’s configuration, and the inclusion of SNMPv3 to make sure the software can be used in more heterogeneous environments.

The new release can be used with both Oracle’s and third-party infrastructure, though costs-wise it’ll be far cheaper to do so with Oracle’s products.

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