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Oracle's long-gestating Oracle Public Cloud service is now live, the company said Wednesday, offering customers more than 100 cloud-based applications and a range of cloud-based platform and social networking services for developers and users.
Oracle also unveiled a new set of premium customer support services for owners of the company's "engineered system" servers and storage products.
"This has been a combination of years of innovation and investment, combined with some key, strategic acquisitions to put this cloud together," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison in a press conference, speaking about the company's cloud applications and public cloud service. "This was a gigantic effort."
[Related: Oracle Offers Partner Certifications For Next-Gen Fusion Apps]
Oracle has been developing its Fusion line of cloud applications for nearly seven years and the first of those products -- cloud-based Financial Management, Human Capital Management (HCM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications -- went live late last year.
Since then the company has beefed up its cloud-application offerings with several acquisitions including Taleo, for talent management, and RightNow, for customer service.
Oracle also announced the Oracle Public Cloud at Oracle OpenWorld in October, but the service wasn't live until now.
In addition to cloud-based applications, the Oracle Public Cloud offers a range of services including infrastructure services, Java development tools and services for programmers, database and file-sharing services, analytics and social networking services.
Ellison called the new offerings "the most comprehensive cloud on the planet" and repeatedly emphasized that customers can move applications and data between the Oracle cloud system and the customer's on-premise data center as needed. "It's very easy to make the migration to the cloud -- gracefully," he said.
In an hour-long presentation, the Oracle CEO touted the flexible capacity of the Oracle Public Cloud. "We have data centers all over the world," he said. While the elasticity of the Oracle service is somewhat similar to Amazon's cloud services, he said, other competitors -- which Ellison didn't name -- "can't respond to capacity on demand."
Ellison touted the system's security. "One of the things about the Oracle database in the cloud is that it's secure. We keep your data separate and secure." The service runs on fault-tolerant hardware for reliability. And Ellison noted that the system is built on industry standards such as service-oriented architecture (SOA), HTML5 and Java.
NEXT: Ellison Takes Competitive Shots Against SAP And Workday
