Larry Ellison, executive chairman and chief technology officer for Oracle, began his keynote by saying that we are in a new era of computing. He then launched into the company’s evolution from a Software as a Service (SaaS) company to a Platform as a Service (PaaS) company to an Infrastructure as a Service company (IaaS).

A new era

Ellison explained that the process began 1o years ago when Oracle started envisioning its space in the cloud. Oracle revised all apps, not by rewriting but developing them in Fusion, and the project led to rewriting the middleware the same way. He then described how the company began working on a platform for business not only to compete with a growing Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) Amazon EC2, but also to help integrate the whole business model.

A new set of competitors

The landscape of competitors has also changed for Oracle. Ellison mentions SAP SE as one of the company’s original competitors; however, he remarked that Oracle rarely sees the software company as a competitor anymore.

He broke down the competition in three categories: applications, where Oracle competes with Salesforce.com, Inc. and Workday, Inc.; platforms, where Microsoft is the key rival; and lastly infrastructure, where the only real player is AWS. He remarked that SAP and IBM are no longer relevant in Oracle’s space and that Microsoft is the only competitor on all three layers of the cloud.

Six design goals

Oracle established six design goals for its cloud services.

Cost: The company wants to have the lowest acquisition cost and lowest cost of ownership. In order to make this happen, the company promises to be equal or lower than AWS pricing. Ellison also said the company sought better automation to reduce labor and human error, and in order to increase productivity, Oracle wanted to make it easier for the end user to build and use applications.

Reliability: The next goal he introduced was high reliability, stating, “Everything is duplex.” He continued to lay out the non-stop applications with zero downtime.

Performance: In order to offer the best cost performance, Ellison described the database will be in-memory flash columnar (Exadata in the Cloud), the middleware will include in-memory speed of thought analytics and the scale out architecture will have elastic capacity and performance on demand.

Open Standards: Ellison said that the company is moving away from proprietary technology in order to enable the enterprise to “lift and load,” even if it means going from Oracle to AWS. He feels that with Oracle’s pricing and superior performance, clients will stay with the company. Everything will run on popular open-source platforms like SQL, Hadoop, NoSQL, Java, Linux and Docker, to name a few.

Compatibility: According to Ellison, “On-premise is not going to disappear.” By building in a high level of compatibility, the idea is to support the enterprise when moving a running database from on-prem to the cloud. He indicated that there would be about another decade before a full transition to the cloud actually happens.

Security: If Ellison had his way, this would be number one on the list. He lists “always on security” and “always on encryption” as features, noting that customers have this feature but fail to turn it on. He feels the closer you push security down the stack the security improves. “If you push security into the hardware, then everything above it is secure,” Ellison stated. He even went as far as putting security on silicon, as that would be extremely difficult to reach.

New releases

Ellison expounded on engineering the three cloud layers to work together.  He said that Oracle will offer integrated applications, platforms and infrastructure down to the silicon. Oracle has the most applications available to the enterprise, and now the company is introducing two new applications for manufacturing and e-commerce in the cloud.

The two offerings, Oracle SCM Cloud is the first complete supply chain and discrete manufacturing suite, completely written in 100 percent Fusion, an Oracle cloud development platform. The second release,  E-commerce in CX cloud (customer experience) provides various components from marketing to social engagement to a variety of industries. Now there will be industry specific features available for financial services, media and  entertainment, consumer packaged goods, telecommunications, manufacturing, retail and high technology.

Extending Saas Applications

Oracle has extended the features in its SaaS line up to include options like drag and drop or the ability to program Java. The goal is to make things easier for the end user with point-and-click features. The company is also making it easier to improve productivity and learn with highly visible and familiar interfaces. Consumer-like Cloud UI makes those interfaces familiar and guaranteed to work on all operating systems and devices.

The new interface will also provide learning capabilities that will offer the user tutorials and videos for training purposes about either Oracle or other company-defined programs. User learning can be tracked for HR and development purposes.

Report cards and further capabilities

Ellison reviewed the Oracle report card and compared the company to the competition. There growth in all three-market spaces is outpacing the industry. The company is moving to open source and a platform without a lock-in, as its applications will work anywhere in the cloud on any provider’s infrastructure.

Oracle will be displaying their push-button technology this week, which allows the user to run identical software in private and public cloud with the capability to push data back and forth on different servers.

Stay tuned for the full video keynote, to see more releases and Ellison’s vision for the cloud. And be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Oracle OpenWorld 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

photo credit: the other Martin Taylor via photopin cc