Cloud computing providers offer their services according to three fundamental models: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS) where IaaS is the most basic and each higher model abstracts from the details of the lower models. Here is a nice visual representation that I got from the Wikipedia entry for IaaS.
Reference: Wikipedia entry for IaaS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_as_a_service#Infrastructure_as_a_service_.28IaaS.29
As part of Oracle Cloud, Oracle has built cloud services for its own PaaS and SaaS offerings on top of the core IaaS layer that includes components like compute, identity, storage, messaging, amongst many others. Thus it is evident that Oracle is consuming core IaaS functionality within their public cloud offerings already.
Oracle will be progressively releasing components of its core IaaS layer to external customers and partners for direct consumption versus just consuming it via its PaaS and SaaS offerings. For example, at Oracle OpenWorld 2012, Oracle announced preview of two of these services - Storage and Messaging - and will continue to announce more in the coming months.
But aren’t there other cloud solutions that offer the ability to deploy compute, network and storage resources with minimal effort and great flexibility, more popularly referred to as Infrastructure as a Service? So what is different? At Oracle, we believe that while this is very beneficial, from a developer’s perspective, the advantage of cloud does not stop there. In fact, greater value lies beyond provisioning of the infrastructure layer where developers devote more than 80% of their time and effort today.This is where Platform as a Service comes in with tremendous benefits for application construction, testing, deployment, and management. So, with on-demand infrastructure, automated provisioning, flexible development and runtime tools and management automation, Infrastructure and Platform cloud services are poised to have a profound impact on the developer experience.
The Oracle Cloud offering is architected in a fashion so that it can offer it not only as part of its public cloud offering but utilizing the same underlying architecture, it can be deploy it in a private cloud or a hybrid cloud configuration. The core IaaS layer allows customers the flexibility and choice of deploying their workloads and driving consolidation via private, public or hybrid cloud strategies. As part of our Private Managed Cloud services, customers are able to run their workloads in a private cloud at an Oracle datacenter or at the customer datacenter, behind their firewall.
We believe that Oracle Cloud is a strategic offering within Oracle's comprehensive cloud services portfolio. Customers are adopting cloud computing in many different ways. Oracle's strategy is to offer them choice and flexibility with the broadest, most complete portfolio of cloud services and products that enable the cloud. Oracle's cloud offerings span public and private clouds and its entire product portfolio - applications, middleware, database, servers, storage, networking, and associated OS and virtualization software.
Oracle’s launched a rolling-thunder roadshow called Oracle CloudWorld, which was just kicked off in front of more than 2,000 attendees in Dubai. The next stop on the Oracle CloudWorld tour will be Jan 29 in Los Angeles, where the keynote will be shared by Oracle executive vice-president and product-development head Thomas Kurian and social and business-strategy guru Charlene Li of Altimeter Group.
Every Oracle CloudWorld event features tracks for the cloud can be used in Sales, Customer Service and Support, Finance and Operations, HR, and Applications Development. You can find the full schedule here, with stops in Los Angeles, Sydney, Mumbai, New York City, Singapore, Tokyo, Mexico City, Frankfurt, and London.
We hope you’ll be able to attend one of the Oracle CloudWorld events. As Bob Evans says in his Forbes article - after all, 10,000 cloud customers and 25 million cloud users can’t be all wrong!!!