As Oracle Open World comes to a close. What are the big take homes? Well I have to admit to not having been at OOW phyiscally this year, but tracking things from the UK. That sais from this vantage point …

• 2nd Generation IaaS. The announcements on the evolution of Oracle’s offfering bring some significant steps forward with multi data centre resilience within each region /geographical area. What isn’t clear is whether the resilience will be OOTB on all services, or a cost add at the IaaS and some of the PaaS services. But for SaaS I’d be expecting it to be part of the offering. Below are a couple of screen grabs from Thomas Kurian’s keynote to help convey the details …

Regions Around the World

Regions Highly Permant Linkage

Illustrative details of Data Centre nodes

IaaS Hardware and Platform Supported

The 2Gen IaaS is interesting because previously Oracle have underplayed the IaaS offering on the basis that it had been necessary to help pitch PaaS and SaaS. But this year with the new generation there seems to be a fair bit of detail on the IaaS make up to help convey and provide clarity of a robust underpinning in capacity, capability, power and security. Which aside from help sell more IaaS it should help reinforce the messaging on the higher order offerings about foundation strength.

• The IaaS message also makes it easier to convey the message that Oracle cloud doesn’t have to mean Oracle software – it is just as capable with OpenSource tech. This had felt a little niche with the Java cloud services. It certainly appears that Oracle wants to take the fight if not to AWS certainly with Azure, Rackspace etc

• Following this IaaS message is the cloud in your own data centre. Which addresses residency questions, but provides the cloud software stack and cloud financial models. What will be interesting is how the auditors (as anything likely to demand on-premise deployment is likely to have compliance needs and audit with it) are satisfied that despite Oracle maintaining all the cloud software remotely won’t represent an issue.

• How the IaaS data centre level resiliency will impact the PaaS offerings is going to be very interesting as SOA providing high availability across multiple locations is not trivial.

• We have also seen signs of far more dynamic elasticity being shown with examples of being able attach policies to a service to trigger scale up. It will be interesting to see if the ability to mix metered and unmetered resources has also improved. Presently they have to be run as discrete domains because of the pricing models involved.

• More broadly Oracle are filling out their cloud portfolio and offerings are starting to be harmonised – but there is a long way to go, for example ICS and SOA CS don’t OOTB link to Log Analytics for example). But MySQL as a PaaS offering has crept up on me, with the smallest compute footprint being 24p an hour it is time to take notice.