Oracle trumpets cloud applications progress at start of 2017

posted in: Cloud/SAAS, Misc. ERP/CRM | 0

By:  Brian McKenna

During Oracle CloudWorld, hosted in New York, Oracle reported that “thousands” of its customers have signed up to cloud delivery of its applications and database technology.

The supplier did not release an exact number for new cloud customers in its second quarter, however it did report a customer roster that includes Pepsi Bottling, Pernod Ricard, RadioShack and bicycle company Trek.

The supplier also announced its setting up of new datacentres to boost its cloud capability. These will be in London, Turkey and Reston, Virginia, in the US, and they are expected to come online by mid-2017, it said.

In a press statement, Oracle affirmed its belief that Oracle Cloud “is the industry’s broadest and most integrated public cloud, including SaaS [software as a service], PaaS [platform as a service] and IaaS [infrastructure as a service]. In the past two years alone, Oracle has delivered more than 50 PaaS and IaaS services to market.”

At the supplier’s OpenWorld customer conference in San Francisco in October 2016, Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison staked a claim for IaaS business in enterprise IT, as well as SaaS and PaaS. The supplier has been on a march to the cloud in the past several years.

In support of the supplier’s cloud human resources (HR) system, Christina Walker, executive vice-president of HR at G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers, said: “As one of the largest family-owned and operated Pepsi franchise bottlers, employing more than 1,650 people at multiple locations across different production facilities, we needed a better way to drive efficiencies and engage with employees.

Oracle HCM Cloud did just that – improving our HR management efficiency by boosting recruiting and onboarding effectiveness so we could identify top talent faster and more cost efficiently, leveraging social media to increase candidate pools from 20 to up to 300 people for a job,” she said.

David Rawls, vice-president of technology at RadioShack, said: “By deploying our Oracle Retail Merchandising System on Oracle Cloud IaaS and PaaS, we are able to reduce our physical server footprint and get faster access to new releases.

“The result is better performance and lower costs. We also can extend compute power at the click of a button, which is especially important during the holiday surge,” he added.

Girish Washikar, global ERP technical manager at Trek Bicycle Corporation, said: “Using Oracle SOA Cloud and Oracle Developer Cloud Services, as well as Oracle’s IaaS will enable us to support continuous growth in global markets by providing increased stability, efficiency and availability of our mission critical SOA infrastructure.

“With Oracle Mobile Cloud Service, we are developing mobile apps which enable our dealers to provide better customer experiences by delivering information and services where and when they need them.”

Oracle said customers can now run database workloads on a broader array of IaaS setups. It announced what it described as “two industry firsts: the availability of the Oracle Database Cloud Service on bare metal compute, and new virtual machine (VM) compute, load balancing and storage capabilities”.

“These latest investments in the Oracle Cloud Platform provide a clear path to develop, test and scale applications – with the Oracle Database or third-party databases,” said Thomas Kurian, president of product development at Oracle.

Michael Ottoman, president and COO at mFrontiers, an Oracle partner and reseller, said: “[We provide] enterprise mobility management as a cloud service for enterprise customers. We find the Oracle Cloud Platform to be easy to use and truly elastic for provisioning and scaling out to additional customers.

“We’re especially impressed by the ability to scale Oracle Database performance up or down on Oracle IaaS without interruption – a key requirement to maximise efficiency and availability,” he added.

Oracle said it has doubled the regional presence of its cloud platform in the past 24 months, with 29 regions available globally. It said more regions are planned to come online in Asia-Pacific (Apac), North America and the Middle East by mid-2018.