Oracle Advances Cloud App Plans
Oracle is pushing forward with its effort to bring its enterprise applications to the cloud.
During a call with press and analysts on Monday, Thomas Kurian, executive VP of Product Development at Oracle, highlighted his company's ongoing cloud application efforts. Kurian noted that since the summer of 2012, Oracle has updated its cloud offerings in a number of different ways.
In the public cloud, Oracle now has new releases of all of its software-as-a-service offerings including ERP, sales and marketing, human resources, talent management and customer service solutions.
“Each of these includes fundamental new capabilities and advances and also are integrated together, so people can use more of these pieces together, if they choose to,” Kurian said.
Kurian added that Oracle has delivered on its platform-as-a-service offerings for database and Java. Those two offerings have also recently been integrated with Oracle Fusion applications, Taleo and RightNow solutions.
“We have customers using those right now to extend the functionality of our SaaS applications by using our platform-as-a-service products in combination,” Kurian said.
Additionally, Oracle recently issued two new releases of its social products, including a social relationship manager and a social engagement and monitoring product. It has been investing heavily in cloud marketing solutions, buying marketing specialist Eloqua last month.
“We're getting very good traction from customers using our social suite both for social marketing and for social listening,” Kurian said.
Social marketing is for enterprises to build social campaigns on Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media. The social listening piece is for monitoring social media in an effort to understand what is happening from a customer feedback perspective. Kurian noted that the social suite has been enhanced to support more countries and languages.
Oracle is now also currently beta testing new platform-as-a-service offerings, including storage, messaging and virtual compute. “You will see announcements from us as we go forward, taking those services into general availability,” Kurian said.
Overall, Kurian stressed that Oracle is actively updating its cloud application portfolio and the underlying infrastructure that supports it. “We've opened new data centers with support for these services in a variety of countries and not just in North America,” he said.
Going a step further, Oracle wants to help enable enterprises to run applications on their own private clouds as well. It's an effort called Oracle Infrastructure-as-a-Service that leverages Oracle hardware running on-site at a customer's location.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
