Parsing the mixed messages analysts and vendors are giving lately about on-prem and cloud takes a keen ear. Some say that moving some applications to cloud is practically mandatory at this point, while others voice doubts about still-young cloud technology. They warn of the dreaded “lock-in” and say companies should keep the option to u-turn back on-prem in their pocket. What’s worse, some say, is most vendors are working one end of the spectrum only and will leave customers fending for themselves if they need to move, according to Dave Donatelli, executive VP of Converged Infrastructure at Oracle.

Donatelli said that C-suites are handing down orders to IT teams to move certain percentages of their applications to cloud by strict deadlines. The problems they face are lack of a clear game plan for doing so and certain stuff that sticks to on-prem. He told John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during Oracle OpenWorld: “What most customers are doing is something in the middle.”

Donatelli argued that his company gives customers “cloud insurance,” because “everything we sell customers on-premise also has cloud equivalency.”

The alchemy of opposites

“If you buy an Exadata [Oracle’s Database Machine] on-premise today, and they say, ‘We want to start moving to cloud,’ you can say, ‘Great, I’ll do this test dev in the cloud with my equivalent Exadata service — they’re fully compatible, it’s got the same management, it’s one push of a button to move data from on-premise to the public cloud,” Donatelli said.

He claimed, “Anybody else is only going to work with you on one extreme or another — it’s either, ‘Hey, I only do cloud,’ or ‘I only do on-prem — how you deal with the other one, you as a customer are stuck with that burden to figure out.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Oracle OpenWorld.

(* Disclosure: Oracle and other companies sponsor some OpenWorld segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Oracle nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE