Oracle may launch its own PaaS offering

30.09.2011
Oracle may unveil its own platform-as-a-service offering next week, setting it in competition with Microsoft's Azure, Salesforce's Heroku and many other smaller services, analysts said.

During its annual OpenWorld conference next week, Oracle is expected to introduce the offering, said Yefim Natis, a Gartner vice president. While Oracle has been selling various products that other companies could use to build either public or private PaaS offerings, it is now planning to host a service itself, Natis said.

Oracle did not reply to a request for comment.

Other analysts said offering such a service is a risk for Oracle but is logical. Oracle may be seeing that enterprises want hosted services and that it will get more value out of offering services itself rather than simply selling products to service providers, said George Hamilton, an analyst with Yankee Group. Oracle could have an ongoing relationship with enterprise customers rather than selling its software to a cloud provider that in turn uses it to deliver functionality.

"It makes sense in the longer term," he said. "People aren't shipping disks any more."

The short-term risk is that Oracle will be essentially competing with customers that it has been .