Oracles Cloud Offering

Image via CrunchBase

Also during OpenWorld Oracle announced its Amazon EC2 Cloud offering.  “Cloud” has really now become a buzz word that really just means any service that is available across the web.

Oracle’s Cloud offerings seem to be their standard apps hosted by Amazon wrapped up with provisioning tools and so you can quickly create a new hosted environment.  But it seems no new licensing models have been created, you pay Amazon for the hosting fee but you still have to acquire traditional Oracle license for their software.

This is quite different to what else is commonly called a Cloud Database offering, such as BigTable, SQL Server Database Services, SimpleDB etc which are functionally stripped down but massively scalable databases (offered as service or DBaaS) targeted to Web 2.0 style workloads.

Not trying to be negative on this, just I think this is not anything particularly new (it used to be called ASP).