Oracle, the software giant — now turning towards cloud — alongside its better than expected Q1 results, today announced that it will unveil the second generation of its cloud infrastructure offerings in the coming days. The company is expected to debut the new technologies at the annual OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco.
In its first quarter(2017) earnings call, Oracle managed to deliver a total revenue of $8.6 billion, up 2 per cent year over year. The company touted strong cloud growth as the driver for the overall development of the company’s business. The regulatory filing notes the total cloud revenue for this quarter hit $969 million, up 59% from Q1 previous year.
The growth of the cloud infrastructure was attributed to two key parts: software-as-a-service(SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS). The revenues of the two platforms combined added to $798 million, up 77 per cent from last year.
Commenting on the growth of cloud infra in the latest earning reports, Oracle CEO, Safra Catz, said,
Our Cloud business plus our On-Premise Software business grew 7% in constant currency in the first quarter, on a non-GAAP basis. The overall top-line growth of our two strategic businesses was driven by non-GAAP SaaS and PaaS revenue growing 82% in constant currency, substantially outperforming our guidance. As our SaaS and PaaS business continues its rapid growth, we expect its gross margins to climb from 62% this quarter toward our 80% target.
As you already read above, Oracle has shown tremendous growth on the SaaS and PaaS cloud front, but there’s another big cloud sector that Oracle isn’t talking much about. This is called Infrastructure-as-a-service(IaaS), where a third-party provider hosts hardware, software, servers, storage and other components on behalf of its users. And Amazon AWS is currently the world leader in providing infrastructure support to thousands(or more!?) digital businesses around the world, while Oracle has no spot in this league.
But, we can expect to see the same change very soon, because Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison has excited the developers and analysts by dropping a hint about the upcoming updates to its IaaS platform. In the statement released today, Ellison said,
Next week at Oracle OpenWorld, we will introduce the second generation of our Infrastructure as a Service. Our Generation2 IaaS delivers twice the compute, twice the memory, four times the storage and ten times more I/O at a 20% lower price than Amazon Web Services. IaaS represents a huge new cloud opportunity for Oracle to layer on top of our rapidly growing SaaS and PaaS businesses.
Ooohh, that’s a very bold statement to make, if you compare it to the scale of Amazon’s AWS services. The company could bet bigger by employing the services of its recent acquisition of the very-first cloud service provider NetSuite for $9.3 billion. The company is looking to end its slump, and move up in rank as compared to its rival cloud services — AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM.
Ellison also surmised the introduction of a new ‘bare metal offering’ that will allow current Oracle customers to shift their databases and softwares to the new service without making any changes to their softwares. To add to your knowledge, bare metal servers provide the raw horsepower(without virtualization) you demand for your processor-intensive and disk I/O-intensive workloads.
So, stay tuned for more updates from the Oracle’s annual tech conference ‘OpenWorld’, which kicks off this Sunday.
