Dive Brief:

• Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison announced at OpenWorld that the company will soon begin offering public cloud services, CIO reported.
• The company’s IaaS product is dubbed Oracle Elastic Compute Cloud, and it will allow customers to choose between elastic and dedicated compute options.
• Last week, HP announced it was withdrawing from the IaaS public cloud market.

Dive Insight:

Oracle has made big investments in SaaS vendors over the last several years, and now offers a range of cloud products, from IaaS to SaaS and PaaS.

Analysts say the company’s transition from DBaaS to SaaS to IaaS has been done out of necessity. Amazon Web Services has grown into a $7 billion-plus annual revenue vendor focusing almost solely on IaaS. Some think it’s not too late for Oracle to compete with AWS and Microsoft in the IaaS space.

“Oracle has one thing that AWS doesn’t,” said Carl Brooks of 451 Research Group. “And that’s the attention of enterprises. If they can offer an on-demand public cloud, they’re hoping they can win back some of that business.”

But not all agree. “They’re way behind in the IaaS market,” said Larry Carvalho, IDC analyst.  

Last week, HP announced it was discontinuing its public cloud offering. But given the expected growth of the cloud market, Oracle may have a decent chance at success if they can offer a quality product at a good cost.