Ellison's Oracle cloud lives as hype winds down

"We will make cloud comp announcement because if orange is the new pink we will make orange blouses. I'm not going to fight this thing. I don't understand what we'd do different in light of cloud computing other than change the wording on some of our ads," he said here.

From this spring, nevertheless - near four years afterwards Ellison said that it was business pretty much as usual except for Oracle's ads - that policy changes dramatically: the software giant will start panning against Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce and others as it sells its software on a subscription basis through its own cloud.

Has Oracle's cloud conversion come too late, even though? Analyst Gartner reckons "cloud" will this year hit the bottom of its famed hype cycle, crashing from a peak of hype into what the mega-analyst calls the "trough of disillusionment".

It was a sentiment repeated by Gartner innovation veep Philip Dawson at the Oracle Cloud Computing conference on Wednesday in London.

Rick Schultz, Oracle's vice president of research product marketing, told The Reg at his company's event that Oracle isn't late and out of luck. He thinks the hype is being burned away by the experience of deployments and that means money for Oracle.

During this time, Oracle has until further notice had the possibility to watch and learn from others: it has, for instance, partnered on Hadoop - increasingly an industry standard - or rather than float its own architecture, as Microsoft attempted previously killing Dryad. Coming ahead of Oracle, in the meantime, has not helped Microsoft reap easy cloud dollars: Windows Azure is making pitiful amounts of money for Redmond.

Either way, with its huge on-premises business and the ability to offer cloud as an extra choice, Oracle can't lose in spite of being late. ®

The performance

Report summarising Microsoft-commissioned testing of the performance and scalability of Hyper-V R2 SP1 server virtualization research.