Tech giant Oracle is throwing down the public cloud gauntlet. Larry Ellison (pictured), executive chairman of the board and CTO, personally announced a beefed up Oracle Cloud Platform on Monday that aims to compete head-to-head with Amazon Web Services.

Oracle Cloud Platform is an integrated suite of services designed to help developers, IT pros, business users and analysts build, extend and integrate cloud apps. Ellison announced 24 new cloud services, including Oracle Database Cloud -- Exadata, Oracle Archive Storage Cloud, Oracle Big Data Cloud, Oracle Integration Cloud, Oracle Mobile Cloud, and Oracle Process Cloud.

“Oracle is growing really fast. We sold $426M software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) worth of business in SaaS and PaaS last quarter, a 200 percent increase over the same quarter last year,” Ellison said. “Our new Archive Storage service goes head-to-head with Amazon Glacier and it’s one-tenth their price.”

Going After Amazon

Ellison wasn’t just spinning hype when he pointed to Oracle Cloud Platform’s growth. Exponential growth is an accurate term. The platform is powering some of the world’s biggest brands, with over 1,800 customers, including Avaya, Calix and Australian Finance Group. Oracle added 1,419 customers in the last quarter and the new innovations could attract more.

“According to IDC’s CloudView Survey, the top IT benefit of PaaS is having ‘a self-service environment for access to development and deployment tools’ -- and for business users the top benefit is ‘built-in integration with my SaaS applications,’” according to Robert Mahowald, program vice president, cloud software, IDC. “Having a full-service PaaS platform alongside a complete applications portfolio satisfies both needs, and users of the Oracle Cloud Platform benefit from access to the robust application development and deployment, data Relevant Products/Services management, big data analytics, integration, and mobile capabilities, satisfying the key IT and LOB needs.”

Ellison seems particularly excited about Oracle Archive Storage Cloud Service, which provides storage for applications and workloads that require long-term retention at the lowest price in the industry. With this so-called deep cloud archive, Oracle is pointing at customers that need to leverage large-scale data sets they don't access all that frequently, such as corporate financial records, cultural preservation content, medical and pharmaceutical archives, digital film masters and insurance records.

“By integrating Oracle Archive Storage Cloud Service with NetApp AltaVault our customers can streamline their utilization of cold storage and finally take advantage of a long-term archival service at a much lower price point,” said Phil Brotherton, Vice President of Cloud Solutions Group at NetApp. “We are extremely excited that our longstanding relationship with Oracle continues to evolve, and together we enable customers to get the most out of the hybrid cloud.”

A Race to Zero?

We caught up with Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, to get his thoughts on the new Oracle offerings. He told us the expanded Oracle Cloud Platform is an interesting play for the company.

“Amazon, Google, Azure and the other providers have largely been providing commodity-like compute services. I’ve always thought of the Oracle Cloud as being more of a fully integrated platform to run Oracle apps,” he said. “In some ways this breaks away from the historical trend of the Oracle platform being used for Oracle stuff.”

Kerravala said that Oracle has the scale and size to be successful competing in this space but he noted that the Oracle Cloud Platform has historically been used to drive the sale of Oracle applications. Going after Amazon, then, is a vast departure from that strategy. He also pointed to Ellison’s price comparison against Amazon.

“This can’t be a race to zero. That shouldn’t be the goal for a company like Oracle,” Kerravala said. “If this ends up being a race to zero, then everybody loses. There has to be some cloud provider somewhere that brings in some value-added features that customers are willing to pay a premium for. We really have yet to see that from public cloud providers.”