Oracle expands cloud services to take on Amazon, Microsoft

Oracle on Tuesday expanded its cloud service offerings with an emphasis on PaaS (platform-as-a-service)as it launched 24 new technologies aimed at leap-frogging over rival brands like Amazon, Microsoft and IBM.

The new cloud services under the tag of Oracle Cloud Platform include Oracle database cloud - exadata, Oracle archive storage cloud, Oracle big data cloud, Oracle integration cloud, Oracle mobile cloud, and Oracle process cloud, the company said in a press release.

"Oracle is growing really fast. We sold $426 million worth of business in SaaS (software-as-a-service) and PaaS last quarter, a 200 percent increase over the same quarter last year. That's an industry record, no company has ever sold that much in just one quarter," Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison was quoted as saying in the release.

Speaking at its headquarters in Redwood City, California, Ellison said Oracle was "the only company on the planet" that could 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. Our new Archive Storage service goes head-to-head with Amazon Glacier and it's one-tenth their price," he added.

The Oracle Cloud Platform will aid customers build new applications, extend existing ones, and easily move existing on-premises workloads to the cloud with no application changes.

"The services are designed to maximise end user experience and productivity; enable developers to manage and analyze data, rapidly develop, test and deploy applications," Mitesh Agarwal, CTO for Oracle India, said.