What Does Oracle Foresee in the Clouds?

In the world of IT, 35-year-old Oracle Corp. is one of the veterans. It also continues to be a big player, with $37 billion in revenues in its 2012 fiscal year.

But the company knows that if it wants to remain a big player, it needs to be big in the cloud. So, this June, the company announced Oracle Cloud, with online applications for customer relationship management, human relations and enterprise social networking. The Oracle cloud includes both platform as a service (PaaS), with online operating systems and network setups, and software as a service (SaaS), with applications and software that live on the company’s servers.

The move puts Oracle in line with longtime competitors like Microsoft, SAP and Google and also lines it up against Salesforce and other SaaS players. InfoWorld has an interesting interview with Oracle Senior VP Abhay Parasnis in which Parasnis emphasizes that the company’s cloud will offer an easy transition for large enterprises that have invested heavily in the way they work with their IT and now want to take it into the cloud.

Aside from moving its existing offerings into the cloud, Oracle has been on a buying spree lately, snapping up companies that offer various cloud services. Among its acquisitions this year are network virtualization provider Xsigo Systems, social media manager Involver, and cloud-based talent management company Taleo Corp., social marketing platform Virtue and social media and text analysis company Collective Intellect.

This is the sixth in a series of blog posts on major cloud computing players.