Oracle, Microsoft and Red Hat: Three Ways to the Cloud

Last month, Oracle, Microsoft, and Red Hat almost simultaneously updated their cloud development plans. Despite the fact that the plans of all three companies relate to corporate cloud computing, the ways in which companies want to exit this market and gain a foothold in it are completely different. It is about this difference that I decided to write my post.

No, wait. All three companies have the same approach - they are trying to use their strengths and present their way to the cloud in a favorable light. But since the strengths of the companies are completely different, then the "cloud approaches" they turn out very different. I will begin, perhaps, with Oracle.

1) Oracle
The most expected were probably the news about Oracle Cloud . And although some information had already been leaked to the press, many people wanted to hear the “confirmation from official sources”. And what is the strength of Oracle? Of course, corporate software, on the purchase of which Larry Ellison spent about 40 billion dollars over the past few years. So, business applications such as ERP, CRM, etc. formed the basis of "cloud from Oracle."

By concentrating on SaaS, Oracle is increasing the pressure on its main competitor, SAP, because, according to Larry Ellison, SAP can create a similar, competing cloud no earlier than 2020. And it is in the field of cloud software that Oracle and SAP have fiercely competed lately - just recall recent SaaS solutions such as Taleo (human resources management), RightNow (customer relationship management) and Endeca (data management) from recent Oracle acquisitions.
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At the same time, Oracle receives insurance from the fact that customers will stop paying license fees by going to the competitors' cloud software. By the way, Oracle is going to provide cloud services on its own hardware - apparently, this is another opportunity to at least indirectly spur the hardware business and show shareholders that the decline in iron sales is not so disastrous.

2) Microsoft
You certainly also know the strength of Microsoft - this is a vast ecosystem of software companies (think of the famous " Developers, developers! "). Microsoft needs to drag and drop them into the cloud and bind users to their solutions with the hands of these developers. Accordingly, Azure is positioned, primarily as a PaaS platform.

A successful strategic plan is the active use of open source projects in Azure , it’s no secret that today they prefer to build clouds on the basis of Open Source, and not at all on proprietary products. As a result, Microsoft not only facilitates the transfer of applications from competing clouds, but also fills its solutions with new functionality for free.

Positioning Azure primarily as PaaS is a good way to distract developers from the fact that Microsoft has its own cloud-based software and, in fact, using Azure, independent developers are pouring water on the mill (of their future?) Competitor.

3) Red Hat
With Red Hat, the simplest picture is that the company deals only with infrastructure software, it does not have its own business applications, so there’s nothing to do on the SaaS field. Red Hat, of course, has its PaaS - OpenShift, and certainly, among PaaS, this is one of the most powerful and promising solutions. However, it is interesting to a rather narrow circle of developers (although now the circle of interested parties is rapidly expanding) - those who write corporate software. Accordingly, they have not yet decided to rely on software developers in Red Hat.

Red Hat understands perfectly well what their customers value and actively use it in their cloud tactics. Red Hat is known for the fact that all its products are open source and all cloud products will obviously not only have this quality, but will also become a key advantage. Of course, not only the availability of source code is important, but also some other properties (read the definition of the Red Hat open cloud ), which is why Red Hat joined the OpenStack community .

Another important advantage of Red Hat software is the choice. Customers appreciate the fact that they are not trying to impose any software, but on the contrary, they allow using as many options as possible. Red Hat CloudForms is designed just to work with "mixed", hybrid IaaS-clouds from different suppliers.

Some conclusions.
So what happens? Oracle has strong positions in the field of applications, good prospects as PaaS platforms (still, since they are Java owners) and not bad, as IaaS providers (thanks to Sun infrastructure solutions). The corporation decided to focus on SaaS, while PaaS and IaaS offers much less attention (it seems that Oracle understands that they will not be able to compete in price with other IaaS / PaaS suppliers).

Microsoft has excellent positions in the field of PaaS, they will certainly be able to quickly fill both their own portfolio of SaaS solutions and present IaaS for windows at very attractive prices.

Red Hat has a good position in terms of supplying IaaS solutions (thanks to OpenStack), promising PaaS OpenShift and frankly weak positions in the SaaS market. But since every independent software developer is interested in making his software work with different clouds, the need for a Red Hat approach is obvious. By the way, PaaS OpenShift uses a similar approach to the "multiplicity" of programming languages ​​and frameworks.

Three companies almost simultaneously “updated” their cloud plans, but at the same time each company had a “closer” approach to one of the types of clouds - IaaS, PaaS or SaaS. In addition, the clouds from these companies differ in “availability” - Red Hat has everything available in the form of Open Source, Microsoft has proprietary software promoted through hosting providers, while Oracle offers to use only its own hardware and data center.