Oracle offers cloud storage at 'one-tenth' Amazon's price

Oracle has announced 24 new cloud services, with chairman Larry Ellison singling out Amazon as a target with its new storage service.

Offerings added to the Oracle Cloud Platform today included Exadata database, big data and SQL, integration, mobile, and process services.

But the biggest buzz was reserved for the new Oracle Archive Storage Cloud Service.

"Our new Archive Storage service goes head-to-head with Amazon Glacier and it’s one-tenth their price," said Ellison at the launch event.

"Oracle is the only company on the planet that can deliver a complete, integrated, standards-based suite of services at every layer of the cloud. Those technology advantages enable us to be much more cost-effective than our competitors."

Ellison added that Oracle's software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service businesses are booming. The same message was pushed during last week's quarterly results announcement, to soothe concerns about a 5 percent drop in overall revenue.

"We sold US$426 million worth of business in software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service last quarter – a 200 percent increase over the same quarter last year," said Ellison overnight.

"That's an industry record - no company has ever sold that much in just one quarter."

The Oracle Cloud Platform added 1,419 customers in the last quarter, according to the vendor, out of a total base of 1,800. Mortgage broker Australian Finance Group was cited as a local example of a big name client already using the Oracle cloud.

Existing services in Oracle's cloud catalogue before today's additions included database, Java, documents, business intelligence and database backup.

Tim Scott, head of PaaS in Australia and New Zealand, said Oracle had been in the infrastructure-as-a-service business for some time and had partnered with existing cloud players for a number of years. "As the cloud strategy is realised, we will find that they augment into areas that compete more directly with existing cloud players," he told CRN.

Ellis co-founded Oracle 38 years ago, with the company rising to prominence on the back of database technology and ERP products. The 120,000-employee company is now consciously promoting itself as a cloud and infrastructure provider.