Oracle Cloud Strategy

Oracle’s cloud strategy focuses on bringing leading infrastructure, technology, business applications, and information to customers and partners anywhere in the world.

To accomplish these goals, Oracle has invested extensively in an array of cloud services to help Oracle customers achieve their business objectives. This overall strategy means that Oracle E-Business Suite can empower its customers and partners with choice and control to deliver strategic advantage through on-premises, cloud, and hybrid deployments.

To evaluate how you can take advantage of Oracle’s cloud offerings and design a hybrid solution for your enterprise, take a look at Oracle’s comprehensive cloud platform. Briefly, Oracle’s cloud platform consists of three major components:

Of these three components, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provide the most immediate benefits. These components are the fundamental building blocks for running Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle Cloud.

(I) SaaS (Software as a service)

SaaS uses the web to deliver applications that are managed by Oracle and whose interface is accessed on the clients’ side. Most SaaS applications can be run directly from a web browser without any downloads or installations required but some SaaS applications require plugins.

So in this strategy Oracle will manage everything which is needed to run the application: applications software, runtime, data, middleware, OSes, virtualization, servers, storage and networking. As of now , Oracle has no plans to offer Oracle E-Business Suite as a SaaS solution. Major SaaS examples in market: Salesforce, Workday, Concur, Cisco WebEx etc

(II) PaaS (Platform as a service)

With PaaS technology, enterprise operations, or a third-party provider, can manage OSes, virtualization, servers, storage, networking, and the PaaS software itself. Developers, however, manage the applications. Applications using PaaS inherit cloud characteristic such as scalability, high-availability, multi-tenancy. Oracle DBaaS (Database as a Service) is one such an example of PaaS.

Oracle’s PaaS encompasses an array of cloud services that address the needs of key IT and business functions such as application development, integrations, business analytics, and so on. You can leverage these services to customize and extend Oracle E-Business Suite applications to meet your business requirements.

Oracle Database Cloud Service (DBCS)

Oracle Database Cloud Service enables businesses to reap all the benefits of PaaS, including subscription-based, self-service access to reliable, scalable, and elastic cloud environments. You can be up and running in minutes, without purchasing and maintaining hardware. There are no changes to the Oracle database, whether it is running on premises or in Oracle Database Cloud Service. And that means there are no new tools or skills to learn. It’s the same software with the same standards, and there are no code changes. When you leverage DBCS, your developers can start innovating right away instead of waiting for weeks for IT to provide new infrastructure and spin up new databases. In addition, critical database administration tasks such as setting up an Oracle RAC environment, patching, upgrades, backup, and recovery can be performed with a few clicks, enabling your DBAs and IT staff to focus on strategic activities and projects. When this happens, operating costs plummet, productivity soars, and the pace of innovation accelerates.

Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service (ExaCS)

The Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service delivers the world’s best cloud database platform by combining the world’s number one database (Oracle) with the most powerful database platform (Exadata), and adding the simplicity and cost effectiveness of the public cloud. The Exadata Cloud Service enables customers to run Oracle databases in the cloud and still have available the same extreme performance and availability experienced by thousands of organizations deploying Exadata on premises. With pay-as you-grow dedicated Exadata configurations, and infrastructure managed by Oracle experts, the Exadata Cloud Service combines business agility and operational flexibility with zero capital expenditure.

Oracle Cloud Machine (OCM) Overview

Oracle now also offers the Oracle Cloud Machine (OCM), which enables you to leverage exactly the same IaaS and PaaS capabilities as Oracle Cloud, but in your own data center. You can leverage cloud innovations while meeting all of your data sovereignty, privacy, and control requirements. The OCM solution allows you to concentrate on tasks that add value to your business, while Oracle installs, maintains, and manages the hardware and the IaaS and PaaS services running on that hardware.

Oracle Managed Cloud Services (OMCS)

Oracle Managed Cloud Services (OMCS) is a critical and proven part of Oracle’s broader cloud offerings that enables organizations to extend their Oracle investments into the cloud with greater confidence, choice, and value.

» Simplified deployment of complex and custom architectures, including integrations with third-party software

» Choice of extended services, including functional help desk, integration, and customization management

» SLA-driven lifecycle management (refresh, backup, and provisioning) for production systems

(III) IaaS (Infrastructure as a service)

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), are self-service models for accessing, monitoring, and managing remote datacenter infrastructures, such as compute (virtualized or bare metal), storage, networking, and networking services (e.g. firewalls).

This gives an excellent option to clients to not purchase hardware and instead can purchase IaaS resources based on consumption, similar to electricity or other utility billing. IaaS users are responsible for managing applications, data, runtime, middleware, and OSes.

IaaS Providers like Oracle still manage virtualization, servers, hard drives, storage, and networking. Advantage here is that user can install any required platform on top of IaaS.

IaaS is like running a ‘virtual’ computer/server on cloud (remote data center). You will get elastic storage*/compute/Network resources which you can scale in/out on will with minimal efforts.

*Compute Cloud Service

Oracle’s IaaS solution, Compute Cloud Service, provides elastic compute capacity, enabling you to adjust capacity to address varying business needs. You can choose either generic compute (shared or dedicated compute) or engineered system IaaS, as shown in figure below. Both the shared and dedicated options provide secure access, a dynamic firewall, and lifecycle management to manage images and to orchestrate the provisioning and automation of lifecycle operations. The key difference is that while shared compute provides core capacity provisioned on a multitenant compute resource, dedicated compute provides a completely dedicated compute zone for each tenant, predictable performance, and complete network isolation.

What is Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle Cloud?

You can think of running Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle Cloud as running exactly the same EBS applications that you run on premises in your data center today—the same applications you may have customized—on a combination of Oracle’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS).

The main choices are:

1. Infrastructure: As part of IaaS, Oracle Compute Cloud Service provides a highly scalable, competitively priced compute capacity that you can use to host your application tier and, optionally, your database tier.

2. Infrastructure + Database: The Database Cloud Service part of PaaS can be used to run your database tier, enabling you to provision your chosen database configuration quickly and easily.

3. Infrastructure + Database + Application Management: You can get assistance with Oracle E-Business Suite applications and database management by deploying managed services on top of the infrastructure and platform services:

» Oracle Managed Cloud Services (OMCS) manages your Oracle E-Business Suite environment on Oracle Cloud. The complete lifecycle management provided by this service includes patching, cloning, and regular technical and functional updates, along with an industry-leading application availability service level agreement.

» Alternatively, you can choose a partner to run your applications and perform routine applications DBA tasks, as well as developing and maintaining your customization and integrations where applicable.

Source: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/ebs-on-oracle-cloud-3220296.pdf