Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Oracle Public Cloud has been announced to what end?

Oracle Fusion Applications OFA is finally coming to the Public Cloud and it seems to be there answer to the moving the titanic just a schuch before raming into the iceberg that stand alone computing is amounting too. From the looks of what they have rolled out it is a modest approach, however, like many of the early cloud PaaS SaaP platform's it's still  a GATED CLOUD* and the customer is still locked into Oracle's overall paradigm and does not seem to have a pathway for Legacy software to be migrated into the OFA stack and I didn't see any mention of security.


 So dig a bit deeper. I do see that back on Sept 16 they released a patch for their Middleware well ahead of the Oct 18 update that was already scheduled and according to PCWORLD The U.S. Government's National Vulnerability Database has assigned a CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) rating of 7.8, "indicating a complete Operating System denial of service,"  So a bit more about how this new offering is different would have been helped to clear the air as Oracle, according to same article pushed back and said it was only a a CVSS Base Score of 5.0.


Some of the details about OFA that I did gleam!



  • Built on —Oracle Fusion Middleware 
  • Complete role-based experience
  • Options including on-premise, hosted, private cloud, or public cloud (hybrid)

Here is a quote that caught my attention when I did some searching. 
 “Oracle Fusion Applications are architected so you don’t have to do rip and replace,” says Jim Hayes, managing director of the consulting firm Accenture. “That’s very important for creating a business case that will get through the steering committee and be approved by the board."  
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/fusion/fusion-changing-the-game-185230.pdf

So part of the package seems to be to get you to integrate the rest of the Oracle cluster 

Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/fusion/index.html

Hence the not ripping and replacing part, So my question is why would a company move to this cloud if they're not already existing Oracle customer.   And, is this really just a strategy to save off customers leaving for another Cloud Provider.  I'm interested in hearing what and DEVOP's folks have to say about this offering and what their experience has been moving to it as a new customer.