"I think it's important for them to be cost competitive," Wang said of Oracle. "Their benchmark has to be Azure, even though they're not going to like that." If Oracle wants a solid developer ecosystem for its Public Cloud, it in turn will need to provide those developers with an attractive revenue model, Wang added.

But Oracle Public Cloud may suffer from a lack of glitz, in the view of Forrester Research vice president and principal analyst John Rymer. "If you look at the work they've done it's nothing groundbreaking here at all. It's a credible offering but I don't see it's going to generate a whole lot of business."

The primary role Oracle Public Cloud will provide is the delivery and support of Java-based SaaS applications, chiefly Oracle's own, Rymer said. "Whatever they do in PaaS is strictly there for customization of the SaaS. It's really about offering industry-based SaaS solutions and providing the Java cloud environment to do the customization."

To this end, Rymer doesn't expect Oracle will make any serious effort to out price the likes of Azure. "There's a higher-level business value proposition here, tied to SaaS," he said.

The IDG News Service