Oracle may launch its own PaaS offering
Oracle may unveil its own platform-as-a-service offering next week, setting it in competition with Microsoft's Azure, Salesforce's Heroku and many other smaller services, analysts said.
During its annual OpenWorld conference next week, Oracle is expected to introduce the offering, said Yefim Natis, a Gartner vice president. While Oracle has been selling various products that other companies could use to build either public or private PaaS offerings, it is now planning to host a service itself, Natis said.
Oracle did not reply to a request for comment.
Other analysts said offering such a service is a risk for Oracle but is logical. Oracle may be seeing that enterprises want hosted services and that it will get more value out of offering services itself rather than simply selling products to service providers, said George Hamilton, an analyst with Yankee Group. Oracle could have an ongoing relationship with enterprise customers rather than selling its software to a cloud provider that in turn uses it to deliver functionality. Read more...
Oracle OpenWorld’s burning questions
Oracle's OpenWorld conference, which kicks off Sunday in San Francisco, could be the biggest one yet for the company, which entered the hardware game last year through the purchase of Sun Microsystems and is closing in on $40 billion in revenue.
But the bigger the company, the more questions it has to answer about its future directions and past promises. The tens of thousands expected at OpenWorld and its sister JavaOne conference will be in search of all the details.
An Oracle spokeswoman declined to comment on the company's planned announcements for OpenWorld, but through interviews with industry experts, reasonable speculation and some digging, here's a look at some of the most important questions facing Oracle going into the show. Read more...