Although late to the cloud, Oracle appears to be intent on making up for lost time.

The company made a strong bid for leadership in the market for hybrid clouds today with a series of announcements ta Oracle CloudWorld in Washington under the banner of “Oracle Cloud at Customer.”

Leading the parade is the Oracle Cloud Machine, a hybrid hardware/software/managed service offering that delivers the identical functionality to Oracle’s public cloud behind the firewall. In a novel twist, Oracle will manage the service on-premise for customers and deliver the same platform and infrastructure updates to both public and private services simultaneously on a subscription pricing basis. The goal is to, in effect, create a seamless cloud platform with a single set of management interfaces. The company also said it will extend a broad range of its applications for use on-site or in the cloud at the customer’s option.

“We are delivering a software-defined virtual data center in the cloud,” said Thomas Kurian, president of Oracle’s product development organizations. “Oracle storage, compute and network can now be crated, removed, allocated and configured through an API just like a software program.”

The hybrid cloud conundrum

The new offering is intended to address the most persistent problems that vex customers that are trying to build seamless hybrid clouds: lack of consistency between hosted and on-premise environments. Wikibon says the lack of functional equivalency between public and private clouds is a danger for enterprises that want to build truly hybrid environments because users frustrated by limited private cloud functionality will default to public cloud options and create a “shadow IT” problem.

With Cloud Machine, users will be able to run applications, middleware and databases on either or both platforms with workload portability supported by identical management toolsets and application program interfaces (APIs), Oracle said. The service will support both Oracle and non-Oracle workloads, as well as all major operating systems.

An integration layer will provide a framework for simplifying the integration of software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and on-premise applications, and the Oracle Messaging Cloud Service will enable communications between software components by sending and receiving messages via a single messaging API, a key feature in building hybrid automated workflows.

Oracle also addressed a key concern of regulated businesses, which often have no choice but to keep some applications and data behind their firewall. It said the service will meet all necessary data sovereignty, residency, compliance and other business requirements while meeting latency and performance service level agreements. These include PCI-DSS for the global credit and debit card industry, HIPAA for healthcare, FedRAMP for the US federal government, Germany’s Federal Data Protection Act and the United Kingdom’s Data Protection Act.

An initial set of basic database offerings will include the Oracle database, MySQL and NoSQL offerings. be followed by Oracle Exadata-as-a-service for high-performance computing demands and a broad set of big data services in the cloud including data discovery, data preparation, Hadoop, and big data SQL.

Understanding that winning the hearts and minds of developers is crucial to cloud success, Oracle also announced support for a broad set of programming languages. Oracle Java Cloud Service is an Oracle WebLogic cluster that provides an initial Java PaaS layer with planned support for Java, Java Enterprise Edition, Node.Js, Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP and Javascript. The company also intends to support Docker containers, which are a popular DevOps platform.

A new generation of hybrid cloud

In a research note coincident with the Oracle announcement, Wikibon cloud analyst Brian Gracely called the Oracle strategy a major step forward in the evolution of hybrid cloud (see image above). “Oracle is laying out a strong vision for helping customers bring Hybrid Cloud services directly to their business opportunities,” Gracely wrote. “Their customers can move past the many challenges of integrating technology and adapting internal operations… We see this offering as one of only a handful of fourth-generation hybrid cloud offerings.”

The strategy leverages Oracle’s greatest strengths, which are the breadth of its applications and its data center stronghold, said David Vellante, Wikibon’s chief analyst. The company’s audacious claim that it wants to be one of the top three cloud vendors is achievable if the it focuses on high-value segments.

“You can only compete with Amazon with massive volume or by doing what Oracle is doing: going up the stack in value,” Vellante said. “If you just focus on the apps business, no doubt Oracle will be in the top three.” He added that he doubts Oracle cares much about competing with Amazon for public infrastructure-as-a-service.

And based on its track record, you can never count Oracle out, noted SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier. “In every major inflection point where Oracle had to shift, they’ve won,” he said.

TheCUBE is covering OracleCloudWorld live.

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