MUMBAI, INDIA: It would be incorrect to say that Oracle attracted a lot of media attention globally because of the CEO’s highly controversial statement on ‘cloud computing’ rather than its innovative solutions and products.

Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO was reported as describing ‘cloud computing’ as ‘re-branding and conflation of existing technologies’. Following the statement, Oracle has been working overtime to take its ‘cloud computing strategy’ across geographies.

As a company’s strategic move, it launched a Cloud Computing Forum and a 50-day long road show on cloud computing across the nations of Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, North and South America. The events kicked-off in early January and will continue till mid April this year.

“Cloud is the evolution of capabilities Oracle has been working on for more than a decade - such as grid computing, virtualization, shared services and management systems,” said Sushil Kumar, Oracle’s vice president of Product Strategy and Business Development System Management Product Group.

Oracle’s cloud computing is the next logical step of grid computing and we were the first company to work with Amazon’s Web services to offer cloud services of our products, Kumar clarified.

According to Kumar, cloud computing is marked by five key characteristics – on-demand self service, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, measure service and broad network access. “Oracle’s perspective on cloud computing is characterized by real, new capabilities but based on many established technologies,” he added.

Further, he explained that cloud offers compelling benefits such as high availability of resources, efficiency, scalability and savings but has serious security concerns too. Kumar was speaking to media on the sideline of Oracle’s road show in Mumbai last week.

“Our cloud computing strategy is to ensure that cloud computing is fully enterprise grade and supports both public and private cloud computing as per customers’ choice,” Kumar stated.

Oracle’s cloud business mainly has three offerings – Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). As a SaaS provider, the company offers a number of SaaS applications along with hosted and managed applications, which are called Oracle On Demand offerings.

The company called itself as an enabler of PaaS, not a provider because it offer enabling technology to PaaS and SaaS providers to build their own service offerings, which is know as the Oracle Platform for SaaS.

Interestingly, Oracle also said it’s not an IaaS provider but it works with IaaS providers such as Amazon Web Services in order to give enterprises the flexibility to choose and deploy Oracle technology in either their own private or public clouds. Also, Oracle has tied up with Rackspace, the US-based managed hosting and cloud service provider, to offer its products and solutions in next few months from now.

According to Forrester Research’s Cloud Computing study 2009, about 44 per cent of large enterprises are interested in building an internal cloud. “Enterprises are more attracted to private cloud compared to public, due to security concerns about mission critical applications and data,” Kumar noted.

In terms of Oracle’s cloud services in India, Kumar stated, “Oracle’s global strategy is same for the India market. We want to manage the clouds, whether you want to build private or public cloud as we had been doing it before in past, which was know as grid computing.”

However he stressed that Oracle’s focus in next 5-10 years is to build private clouds for enterprises.

While Oracle is making sure that the cloud message the goes out to universe is loud and clear, many tech analysts viewed that Oracle’s foray into cloud computing has to do a lot because of Sun Microsystems.

“Sun Microsystems has strengthened us; however, the acquisition of Sun Microsystems has been just a coincidence because we had been doing cloud for many years with our Orcale Ondemand CRM solutions,” Kumar commented.

From business point, Oracle is a late entrant in the cloud computing space and will have to do a lot to get anywhere close to Salesforce.com.