Oracle founder Ellison demos new services at OpenWorld

KARLIN LILLINGTON in San Francisco

In his second keynote at Oracle's annual OpenWorld user conference here, company founder and chair Larry Ellison put on his new chief technology officer hat to do some hands on, live demonstrations of Oracle services.

“Because of my new job — I’m CTO now — I’ve got to do my demos by myself,” quipped Ellison.

Where his opening keynote Sunday focused on broader product and strategy announcements, his second honed in on a deeper look at the company’s database platform as a service (PaaS) and more plugs for moving to the cloud.

Oracle differentiates its PaaS ifrom its infrastructure as a service — or basic public cloud infrastructure which can be used to host and run applications and store data— by the addition of management and automation tools.

“We do much more automation, we do much more for you,” said Ellison. “There’s a very big difference between running an application on our platform and running it on our infrastructure.”

The foundation of the PaaS is Oracle’s database as a service, and on top of that, its Java-based WebLogic service, which enables applications and browser-based services to connect to databases. Also included are various software tools for building and managing applications.

Ellison noted that moving a database or application to the Oracle PaaS — which can be done with a single button click — automatically updates it to have the same capabilities built in to the platform itself. This makes it easy to add social and mobile features, and design an application to run on multiple platforms or include data analytics.

“Push a button, you move and modernise the application,” said Ellison.

Moving databases or applications does not require rewriting or adding any new code, he added.

He said Oracle was the only company that would enable customers to run their applications in the same database platform environment in which Oracle designed and built its own products, making it easy for customers to extend the capabilities of their applications.

"Most SaaS companies do not sell platform services. Those that do, do not offer you the same platform they built on," he said, noting that rival Salesforce "have one platform they build on, and another, separate, proprietary platform they offer you to extend on."

Oracle’s platform is standards-based, he said.

He also stressed that companies do not need to make a full jump into the cloud.

“Some of applications can be on premise, some can be in the cloud,” he said. “The cool thing about the Oracle cloud is it was designed to gracefully coexist with your data centre … it all kind of looks like one collection of computers.”

He also made a bid to reassure the audience that cloud-based computing is not hype, but has longevity and stability. Oracle had many independent software vendors with applications they’d like to move to the cloud, he said, as well as “hundreds and thousands of customers”.

“So we’re just getting started.”