Thomas Kurian, president of product development at Oracle, affirmed the company’s commitment to the cloud as he took to the stage at Oracle CloudWorld in Washington, D.C. to deliver his keynote address. He explored the various cloud options available to customers to help organizations make the digital transformation by demonstrating the Oracle Cloud SaaS, PaaS and IaaS Suites.

The end goal of the lengthy demonstration of features and benefits was to really hit home with the company’s latest offering Oracle Cloud at Customer, a hybrid offering that packs all the benefits of the service offerings and allows companies to run it on premise.

Everything as a Service (EaaS)

Kurian began with the latest Software as a Service (SaaS) suite and moved through the company’s Platform as a Service suite (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service suite that is available through Oracle Cloud.

As Kurian took us through the various service suites, with all the functionality, he demonstrated the features and the ease of use through APIs that were intuitive and provide businesses with a solution to operate in a hybrid environment and with all the benefits of scaling and elasticity that the cloud provides. The overall demonstration showed how everything is set up through APIs; there are no servers to buy and everything is done programmatically through software.

Behind the firewall

Kurian than announced, “The exact same software that runs on a customer’s cloud is now available on customer’s data center floors. So Oracle, IaaS and Paas is now available in your data center. Same software, the same APIs that gives you seamless workload portability is now available for your data center.”

Citing the need to address customer concerns around legislative, statutory, and regulatory requirements and policies, Kurian noted that customers can now have the benefits of PaaS and IaaS, such as not buying hardware, subscription-based pricing and elastic metered pricing at the exactly the same price point.

Oracle Cloud at Customer requires a hardware box that runs IaaS and Paas, and Oracle provides a set of capabilities to manage the environment. The standard hardware configuration is available in three model options with varying Intel core sizes, memory amount and storage limits that allow you to run Oracle Cloud behind your firewall.

The benefits Kurian outlined are a fully-managed data center by Oracle, flexible hardware configurations and affordable pricing.

Industry outlook from IDC

Melanie Posey, research VP at IDC Research, Inc., took to the Oracle CloudWorld stage to present key industry trends in the Digital Business Transformation. International Data Corporation (IDC) is a provider of market intelligence, advisory services for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets.

Posey’s theme, “Hybrid IT living in a Multi-Cloud World,” centered on new approaches to business enabling IT. According to Posey, the “third platform” is the foundation of the process of digital transformation. Outlining the three platforms, the first platform is made up of mainframes and very static and siloed IT, the second platform became a little more distributed with the client-server approach to things, however, it is the third platform that takes everything to a new level where it’s highly distributed and highly scalable and supports billions of users and devices.

New rules for business

The third platform has four pillars: social business, Big Data and analytics, mobility and cloud. Posey called the cloud the “center of everybody’s universe” and noted that cloud enables flexibility and scalability to create new business value.

Posey said that as customer expectations rise, services require the ability to get data anywhere, anytime and from any device. Businesses need to develop services faster, innovate faster, and be more resilient and reliable in their own operations. As transformation to digital occurs, businesses will need to rely more on their service providers.

Hybrid requires a partner

Using an IDC study, Posey talked about the enterprise view on cloud. According to the study, 57 percent of businesses surveyed are embracing the cloud, using two or more cloud services on a consistent basis. Of this 57 percent, 36 percent are using public cloud, 38 percent are using private cloud and 18 percent are using both.

The study also points out that most businesses are moving away from the traditional IT in the next two years. And while traditional IT (in-house or outsourced) will still be around, there is what Posey calls an unstoppable trend from legacy to cloud.

Ultimately, hybrid cloud and diversified IT environments are already common, but the study indicates that this trend is the next frontier of the digital transformation. With 64 percent of business worldwide employing some type of hybrid model, considerations for the future are how will businesses move into this environment and who will facilitate it.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Oracle CloudWorld 2016. And make sure to weigh in during theCUBE’s live coverage at the event by joining in on CrowdChat.

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