Oracle has been pushing the Cloud applications like PBCS,
EPBCS and so on for quite some time now and in this blog, I would be talking
about why it makes business sense for Oracle to have applications on cloud.
This is more of an inference from my end so I can woefully wrong, in which case
I would ask you to bear with me.
If you look at NIST Definition of Cloud Computing (http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublication800-145.pdf
) , you will observe that any cloud computing environment must have the
following essential features: -
- · On demand self-service.
- · Broad network access.
- · Resource pooling.
- · Rapid elasticity.
- · Measured service.
With tools like EPBCS or PBCS, Oracle has basically made the
cloud game not about infrastructure, but rather about the applications that are
available on-demand. While we can continue to debate if the applications are
easy to implement and deploy, what has to be remembered is that there is a lot
of ease for Oracle in working on a cloud environment from a purely financial
and software development/deployment perspective. These are some of the points
that I believe to be crucial: -
Tapping the untapped market: - The subscription model of
Cloud is basically focused on small and medium business users who would not
have adequate financial resources to invest in the hardware resources and IT
infrastructure for a full-fledged EPM application. These are the users who are
currently not using Oracle, so Cloud applications are focused on getting them
into the Oracle camp. These users would be diametrically skewed. (This document
“A Comparison of SMEs in Europe and in the USA” is an excellent read http://www.eurocapitalmarkets.org/system/files/SMEE_book.pdf
Below snapshot is taken from that document)
If from a market of approximately 85 percent, even if we can
get 30 percent of these users into the Oracle fold, it is a quite a big source
of untapped income adding to the bottom line.
Fixing the variable: - Since the Cloud that hosts
applications like PBCS and EPBCS is handled all by Oracle, it gets tremendous flexibility
in fixing the variables like hardware configurations. Let us take a cloud
environment. I will have an Exalytics machine as my hardware platform, Oracle
as database and maybe Oracle HTTP server for web communication. Now all that my
development team needs to worry about is developing something focused on this
platform. Compare this with have three different OS(Microsoft, Linux and
Solaris), two database vendors(Oracle and Microsoft) and say three web servers
for web communication. I may either have to come up with a Platform independent
code, which is the Holy Grail in computing or have a common stack and then
build for each environment specific code routines. So now I have almost 3*2*3=18
design paths to consider. And more the paths, more the chances of things going
wrong. And we are not evening considering other tools interfacing here. Tying this variability
on the things that are traditionally out of control in on-premise applications
is an added advantage for the Oracle development team.
Smaller, incremental developments and anonymous updates: - The
other big plus for Oracle is that it is now possible for Oracle to have smaller development cycle for applications and its subsequent updates. Imagine
a situation where you downloaded EPM, but then have to do patch update. No one
likes patch updates simply because every time we had a patch update you need to
gauge business impact, the associated testing cycle and rollback plans. But with
a cloud environment, I can pretty much do everything in relative anonymity and make
this a low key affair. And if it does not work, no one needs to know since I
can just rollback the changes.
These I think are the top three reasons why it makes
business sense for Oracle to push for cloud applications. Comments and feedback
are most welcome.
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