The Oracle Cloud Has Arrived

He may have made fun of the term “cloud” back in 2009, but now Larry Ellison is singing a different tune, as the CEO of Oracle formally announced the full availability of the Oracle Cloud at a webcast event this week in San Francisco.

Seven years in the making, the Oracle Cloud includes versions of all the company’s software products, including database, CRM and collaboration tools, and is based on the same standards that enterprises are using today.  Those standards include SQL, Java and HTML5, which enable a degree of openness and portability. Ellison blasted rival Salesforce.com last year for their lack of openness, calling them a “roach motel” from which you can check in but never leave.

Oracle is still gunning for Salesforce.com today, announcing the release of a Social Relationship Management (SRM) offering in conjunction with the Oracle Cloud debut that is different than traditional CRM (Customer Relationship Management) services from firms like Salesforce.com. Ellison demonstrated the platform onstage, showing how it is fully integrated with social media management capabilities for Twitter and Facebook.

Ellison explained that the goal of the “SRM” offering is to enable users of the platform to work with people before they are customers and to build relationships so that they will become customers. Going a step further, the system can be used to analyze and understand what customers are saying in order to drive them to acquire more products.

While the cloud and social relationship management offerings have only just now been officially released, the Oracle Cloud has been available in preview form since 2011 when it was announced at Oracle’s OpenWorld.

Read more of this article on Datamation:
Larry Ellison Delivers the Oracle Cloud

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.