Oracle offers software for a seamless hybrid cloud

"Customers are excited about the cloud, but they are concerned about the cloud being treated as something fundamentally separate, as another silo," said Dan Koloski, Oracle senior director of product management.

The newly unveiled Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 5 offers the ability for system administrators to manage computing jobs in the Oracle Cloud Platform alongside those being managed in-house, using the same software console.

This approach could potentially streamline an organization's IT architecture as it moves its operations to the cloud. It could also reduce the amount of work an administrator must do to gain an understanding with what is happening across all of the organization's workloads.

Oracle is one of a number of companies pursuing this hybrid model of cloud computing, in which the supporting infrastructure software offered by cloud operations closely resembles the software being used in-house, as a way to minimize the work needed to migrate workloads to and fro.

In a similar approach, Hewlett Packard's Helion software line provides an easy path to using the HP Cloud services, using HP's in-house management software. Likewise, Microsoft has been sculpting its infrastructure software -- such as Windows Server, SQL Server, and System Manager -- to make it easy to switch between in-house operations and those running on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service.

Oracle Enterprise Manager is the vendor's flagship package for managing Oracle and third-party software. It collects, in real time, operational information about how well software is performing, aggregating operational information by services, types of software, or user-defined groups.

Initially, Oracle Enterprise Manager will recognize copies of Oracle databases and its WebLogic application server running in the Oracle Cloud as if they were running on the company's own internal network. It relies on a piece of software called the Oracle Enterprise Manager Hybrid Cloud Gateway, which brokers communications between the Oracle Cloud and the internal network, using a standard Internet connection. This approach does not require setting up a virtual private network to the Oracle Cloud, which many Oracle customers were reluctant to do, Koloski said.

With these new capabilities, workloads running on these applications can be easily copied, from either in-house to the cloud, or vice versa. The software also sets the stage for extending all of an organization's data governance and configuration compliance policies to the Oracle Cloud.

Oracle has been quietly expanding its cloud services. In March, the company announced that its cloud business had generated US$527 million in the preceding three months, up 29 percent from the same time a year prior.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com