The Oracle vision of the cloud is late, for sure. Ellison waffled on the value of the cloud for sure, even though he doesn’t want to admit it. Despite this all, though, the Oracle Public Cloud is important for the cloud market, for three basic reasons.
Reason number one is that it demonstrates yet again that the cloud is a new application architecture and not a hosting strategy. This isn’t about public, or private, it’s about hybrid on one sense, but only in one sense. Truth be told, the cloud message is about resource transparency. Ultimately, the cloud is sort of compute Marxism; “from each according to its requirements to each according to its capabilities”. Stuff runs where it runs best and it doesn’t matter where that is.
Microsoft’s Azure has always been such a model, and this is the model that HP has announced too, but it’s not the dominant model of public cloud vendors because they ARE public cloud vendors not software providers. Oracle’s joining of the fray is a pretty good guarantee that all the public cloud guys will be struggling to create private architectures, but unless they grasp the essential reality of resource transparency they’ll miss the mark.
The second truth is that Oracle is demonstrated that IaaS isn’t the answer. Users consume SaaS whatever the cloud platform is, so everything is going to be judged by its ability to present application services to consumers and workers. IaaS is too far down the food chain here; you can’t create a unified model of resource transparency and couple it with a notion of application empowerment if you start with virtual bare iron. This is a PaaS game, in no small part because a new set of platform ingredients are needed to create the pervasive resource-transparency vision and equip it to host apps of any sort, for any mission.
Oracle’s big benefit here is that it can incorporate Java and RDBMS services into its platform, and both these things are critical for the way the cloud has to evolve. Remember the application-centricity? It’s making the apps presentable, composable, distributable that matters in that mission, and Java is a big element in building RESTful interfaces that present application functionality to GUI composers.
The third truth is that all of the sellable experiences of the network of the future are really applications running in the cloud, just like the business stuff is. There is no separate architecture for service provider IT and enterprise IT, any more than there’s a different architecture for banks versus utilities. Software is software, and all of the aspects of application deployment and service deployment are faces of the same coin. You’ll get your network features of the future via RESTful interfaces too.
This is the thing that’s been hurting the network guys. The Street yesterday gave Juniper another downgrade and told Alcatel-Lucent that its margins were at risk to being unsustainable, making a default for the company a risk. OK, I agree with both those points, but what’s interesting is that both companies had an opportunity to do the right thing in the emerging cloud-driven future, and both failed to do so. This isn’t about making network equipment “better” it’s about creating a totally new context for network equipment—maybe “cloudwork equipment” tells the tale best.
I think we, as an industry, have gotten ourselves into a pickle by letting ourselves be focused by vendors and not by markets. You look at the media today and you see very tactical stories; little or nothing about grand movements of technology trends. That’s because nobody wants to sell a grand movement. BYOD is a cloud issue. SDN is a cloud issue. What Light Reading (inelegantly) calls “SPIT”, or Service Provider Information Technology, is a cloud issue. The Internet’s future is the cloud, and so is the future of the data center. But it’s not just a matter of hosting on Amazon or replacing Cisco or Juniper routers with hypothetical OpenFlow switches. It’s a matter of rethinking the role of IT. It’s never been about doing the same thing with successively cheaper stuff, it’s been about doing a LOT more with a LITTLE more in cost. We can’t get there tactically, just as we can’t get to the cloud tactically. Sometimes you have to lift your eyes from the dust of the trail and look over the next hill.