Oracle Unveils New Products, Then Drifts Into The Cloud

摘要

Oracle last week unveiled software for workplace collaboration and applications to help insurance and pharmaceutical companies and others that depend on clinical trials. But more important, the company made its first move into cloud computing. In collaboration with Amazon.com, Oracle will let customers run Oracle 10g and 11g databases and its Fusion middleware in virtual machines within Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud service. Since Oracle offers its own version of Linux, the database or middleware can be sent as a complete package to EC2. It's too early to know how many IT departments will shift toward Oracle in the cloud, but they now have an alternative to Oracle's do-it-yourself grid computing. "Cloud computing is just another word for grid," says Andy Mendelsohn, Oracle's senior VP of database server technologies. The move into cloud computing is a significant strategy shift for Oracle, which until last week had downplayed the trend. Customers can apply existing Oracle software licenses to the new cloud services, a sign the company's trying to make it easy for businesses to test the cloud. Oracle knows where to look for growth; its just-reported fiscal first-quarter net income jumped 28% to $1.1 billion, with a 29% operating margin.