In a live presentation that was also made available on the web, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled Oracle’s cloud strategy and introduced Oracle Cloud Social Services, a new enterprise social platform offering. “We made a decision to rebuild all of our applications for the cloud almost 7 years ago. We called that project ‘Fusion,’” he told the audience. While joking that, at the time, some competitors called it “con-fusion,” Ellison also recounted the years of work, input from thousands of people, and billions of dollars that were required to enable Oracle to make the transition from being an on-premise application provider to being a cloud application provider - as well as an on-premise application provider - and to rewrite and modernize all of its applications.
“It was an enormous effort. Very few technology companies cross the chasm from one generation of technology to the next. It requires that you recognize that there is a big change coming. You recognize it early enough. You make the investment in the next generation of technology while continuing to invest in your existing generation. It’s a very challenging thing for tech companies to do – that’s why most of them never make it across the chasm,” said Ellison.
Oracle is now in a position “where we can launch the most comprehensive cloud on the planet Earth, the most enterprise-grade applications, the most complete platform and the most modern, socially-enabled technologies and applications,” Ellison added. With this announcement, Ellison said, Oracle is offering more than 100 production-level, enterprise-grade cloud applications to provide a complete suite.
Oracle Cloud
According to the company, Oracle Cloud delivers a broad set of industry-standards based, integrated services that provide customers with subscription-based access to Oracle Platform Services, Application Services, and Social Services, all managed, hosted and supported by Oracle.
Offering a range of business applications and platform services, Oracle says the Oracle Cloud enables customers to avoid the data and business process fragmentation that occurs when using multiple, siloed public clouds.
Oracle Cloud is supported by enterprise-grade infrastructure, including Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic, and aims to provide easy self-service for both business users and developers. Business users can order, configure, extend, and monitor their applications. Developers and administrators can easily develop, deploy, monitor and manage their applications.
Oracle Cloud Platform Services
Built on a common, complete, standards-based and enterprise-grade set of infrastructure components, Oracle Cloud Platform Services are intended to enable customers to speed their time to market and lower costs by building, deploying and managing customized applications. Oracle Cloud Platform Services will include:
- Database Services to manage data and build database applications with the Oracle Database.
- Java Services to develop, deploy and manage Java applications with Oracle WebLogic.
- Developer Services to allow application developers to collaboratively build applications.
- Web Services to build Web applications rapidly using PHP, Ruby, and Python.
- Mobile Services to allow developers to build cross-platform native and HTML5 mobile applications for leading smartphones and tablets.
- Documents Services to allow project teams to collaborate and share documents through online workspaces and portals.
- Sites Services to allow business users to develop and maintain visually engaging .com sites
- Analytics Services to allow business users to quickly build and share analytic dashboards and reports through the Cloud.
Oracle Cloud Application Services
Oracle says its Cloud Application Services provides customers access to enterprise applications, with built-in business intelligence, social and mobile capabilities. Oracle Cloud Application Services will include:
- ERP Services: A complete set of Financial Accounting, Project Management, Procurement, Sourcing, and Governance, Risk & Compliance solutions.
- HCM Services: A complete Human Capital Management solution including Global HR, Workforce Lifecycle Management, Compensation, Benefits, Payroll and other solutions.
- Talent Management Services: A complete Talent Management solution including Recruiting, Sourcing, Performance Management, and Learning.
- Sales and Marketing Services: A complete Sales and Marketing solution including Sales Planning, Territory Management, Leads & Opportunity Management, and Forecasting.
- Customer Experience Services: A complete Customer Service solution including Web Self-Service, Contact Centers, Knowledge Management, Chat, and email Management.
Oracle Cloud Social Services
According to Oracle, with Oracle Cloud Social Services, enterprises can engage with their customers on a range of social media properties in a comprehensive and meaningful fashion including social marketing, commerce, service and listening. The platform also provides enterprises with a rich social networking solution for their employees to collaborate effectively inside the enterprise. Oracle’s integrated social platform will include:
- Oracle Social Network to enable secure enterprise collaboration and purposeful social networking for business.
- Oracle Social Data Services to aggregate data from social networks and enterprise data sources to enrich business applications.
- Oracle Social Marketing and Engagement Services to enable marketers to centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on their social marketing campaigns.
- Oracle Social Intelligence Services to enable marketers to analyze social media interactions and to enable customer service and sales teams to engage with customers and prospects effectively.
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