Oracle has ruled out following
Amazon's strategy of renting out commodity space on hardware
farms as part of its cloud computing strategy.
"That business is not profitable and Oracle would not want to
get involved until the economics change," said Thomas Kurian, SVP
of product development at Oracle. He was speaking at the
London launch of
Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g this morning.
Commentators have speculated that Oracle could follow in
Amazon's footsteps after its acquisition of hardware and software
company Sun Microsystems announced earlier this year.
"
Should the acquisition of Sun continue, we will disclose our
[hardware] plans when the deal is finalised," said Thomas
Kurian.
Oracle's vision of
cloud computing is about deploying information systems and
applications in a virtualised environment using a pool of hardware
and about processes that deliver those as services, but not
necessarily together, he said.
Oracle Fusion Middleware [OFM] enables organisations to use
either of these types of cloud computing on their own or together,
said Kurian.
Oracle provides its software as a service through its on-demand
division as well as licensing its software for third parties using
a cloud computing model.
"We do have cloud strategy, but the term is used to mean so many
different things that Oracle prefers to be more specific about what
is meant," he said.
Kurian said OFM provides that functionality and is used by the
top ten cloud computing providers, including Amazon.