At the Oracle Utilities Edge Conference the word most said was "Cloud" and whilst I tried to avoid overusing the word in my sessions I think it is important to clarify and understand what this means to your implementation.
- We announced our Software As A Service plans and capabilities at the Oracle Utilities Edge Conference. This is a full service offering from us.
- We announced our support for Platform As A Service (a whitepaper will be out in a few weeks time on this) and support for Private Clouds.
- We announced a series of capabilities across deploying, extending and managing our cloud implementations available now, soon and in the future.
Even if you are not intending to use ANY cloud facilities now and in the future there are some key messages to remember:
- EVERYTHING, that is applicable, we are introducing to make or cloud implementation easier and more efficient will be rolled into the products (either into the product or the Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities) available for on-premise and Private Cloud implementations. This is a key thing to remember. Just because we are focusing some of our efforts on the cloud, we are not abandoning other implementation styles. Anything we make easier will make your implementations much easier.
- We are not assuming all customers will use the cloud so we are offering flexible cloud offerings to cover as much of the spectrum as we can. For example, you can use PaaS for your non-production environments and retaining on-premise for production. This gives you full access as you would see on site with some of the cost moved away.
- We are in fact duplicating some of our functionality for on-premise and cloud implementations. For example, I announced that all the cloud metrics we are exposing to the cloud will also be available in our Application Management Pack for Oracle Utilities as well for on-premise implementations. This is just an example of trying to give you what we use. Our Oracle Functional/Load Testing Advanced Pack for Oracle Utilities is another example. It contains the testing components we use in our QA cycles.