Oracle announced its new cloud service during its OpenWorld event. During the last three years, Oracle has initiated an extensive repositioning strategy. After focusing primarily on the private cloud, the company is now working to redeploy its offer in the public cloud area. SaaS and PaaS represent now the bulk of its business in this area, summing to about 2 billion revenue – against « only » 650 million for the cloud infrastructure (IaaS).

The least we can say is that Larry Ellison missed its entering in the market in favor Amazon Web Services and must now race to stay in the pack. Yet, Oracle has not said its last word thanks to its technological expertise but definitely lost time and must now compete with installed players such as Microsoft, Google and IBM. Oracle intends to accelerate its growth in the IaaS. For its OpenWorld event held last week in San Francisco, Oracle unveiled the second generation of its IaaS offering. And the company clearly names its competitors and wants to offer “a real alternative” to Amazon Web Services (AWS) by setting the value of its new service on both performance and price.

“The second generation of our Infrastructure as a Service offers twice the computing power, twice the memory, four times the storage, and I/O performance 10 times faster than AWS, for a price 20 % lower” said Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO.

Oracle will offer servers with capacities up to 36 physical CPU cores in order to meet the demand of performance and highest safety. Oracle intends to offer to its customers a cloud alternative to their most critical on premise infrastructure. “They will have the option to install these servers with the OS they want” promised Oracle.

The deployment of Oracle new cloud infrastructure will be gradual. For the moment, the service is only available in Phoenix, Arizona. The IaaS will be extended to the eastern region of the United States by December or January. Deployment in Europe should start mid-2017. Also, as an external growth transaction, Oracle announced the acquisition of Palerra, a publisher of cloud services security software. Loric, the flagship product of this company is a powerful cloud utility (data security, user behavior analysis, management of security configurations …) that should strengthen the Oracle Identity Cloud Service offer for Identity Management.