Oracle launches its latest IaaS offering to rival Amazon

Software giant Oracle announced the general availability of its new Bare Metal Cloud Services yesterday Oracle which was first revealed at the OpenWorld conference last month by the company CTO, Larry Ellison. The new IaaS product has been described as giving the company a “technological advantage over Amazon”. “Amazon’s lead is over,” Ellison had said at the launch. “Amazon’s going to have serious competition going forward.” The product provides a “bare metal” cloud which are servers with no Oracle software running on them, operating in a virtualized network environment that is designed to deliver high performance Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS), network block storage, object storage and VPN connectivity. Expressing her views on the new IaaS offering, Lydia Leong, a Gartner analyst said in a blogpost:

“Oracle has paid richly to hire an “A” team, so to speak — former long-time senior AWS engineers lead the project, and they’ve recruited heavily from all three hyperscale clud providers in Seattle (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform). These are credible product and engineering people who, in my opinion, understand what they need to build and the enormous challenges ahead of them.”

According to Oracle, the bare metal cloud servers are about 11 times faster and 20-percent cheaper than the fastest solution offered by the competition. With a pay-for-what-you-use billing module and storage and networking by the month, the company aims to make it easy to understand the costs. The new services interoperate with existing Oracle Public Cloud services, and they can be provisioned on-demand, by console or API. However, Leong holds that pricing will not be Oracle’s key selling point. She said:

“It is unlikely that Oracle’s announced price-point — 20% below AWS list prices — will be sufficient to move the needle in a market where AWS’s “real” prices are lowered up to 70% by reserved instances (plus AWS negotiates custom discounts), and where Google is already competing intensively on price (especially on negotiated deals) and has an offering substantially more featureful than what Oracle will have in the market in the next year.”

While Ellison is confident about this new leap, the company is far behind its rivals in the cloud infrastructure services market in terms of revenue so far. This latest attempt is indeed a big card it is playing to catch up with the big fishes. The company said Bare Metal Cloud Services is available now in a new US-Southwest region, with additional regions coming soon.