Oracle this week extended the scope of the cloud services it manages on behalf of customers to include a low-code application development platform based on the company’s Visual Builder development tools.
Jeff Price, vice president of product Management at Oracle, said Oracle Autonomous Visual Builder (VB) Cloud makes it possible to employ a tool based on JavaScript to build applications that might be written, for example, in Java or, going forward, Jakarta EE. Autonomous Visual Builder Cloud is available via a managed service that can easily integrated with a variety of back-end services managed by Oracle or running on-premises.
To complement that effort, Oracle also announced the availability of Oracle Autonomous Analytics Cloud and Oracle Autonomous Integration Cloud. Oracle Autonomous Visual Builder comes with tools for accessing back-end services, while Oracle Autonomous Integration Cloud provides a raft of additional connectors for accessing a wide variety of other Oracle and third-party services, Price said.
Oracle also committed to delivering additional autonomous services later this year to address mobile and chatbots, data integration, blockchain, security and management and additional database workloads such as online transaction processing (OLTP). Those services will complement existing Oracle autonomous database and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments.
Price said interest in low-code development tools is accelerating as organizations look to extend business processes that have been automated using either packaged applications running on-premises or in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. Rather than trying to achieve that goal using low-level application programming interfaces (APIs) that are fragile, Price said low-code tools such as Oracle VB make it simpler for even citizen developers to construct applications leveraging code developed by professional developers.
Organizations need to decide for themselves when to customize those application environments versus taking advantage of them in a turnkey manner, Price said. Organizations tend to heavily customize customer experience and customer relationship management (CRM) applications, while relying on best practices that have been coded into enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. Oracle is changing the way it supports those applications—base-level support for these applications is now free, but Oracle will continue to charge for premium services.
The need to customize applications at scale is driving many more traditional enterprise IT organizations to adopt DevOps processes that now need to span multiple IT environments, Price said. He added Oracle now provides integration with multiple continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platforms to facilitate that transition.
As Oracle assumes more responsibility for managing the underlying platforms, organizations in theory should be able to devote more resources to developing applications. To achieve that goal, however, many of them will need to figure out how to extend their DevOps processes to include Oracle as a managed service provider.
Oracle also provides access to unmanaged infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and (PaaS) services in much the same way Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft do. Oracle has been late to the cloud game, but this week announced a slew of new cloud customers, including Atomitech Inc., Edith Cowan University, Future Robot, Barrick Gold Corporation, C’s NEXT, Colegio de Bachilleres, Contribute NV, DP World Ltd., Dubai Airport Freezone Authority, Emirates Flight Catering, Hytera Communications Ltd., Ildong Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., Konyang University, Land O’Lakes Inc., Leshan City Commercial Bank, McDermott, MCore Group, New Hope Liuhe Co. Ltd., Promata, Stallion Oilfield, Ornua Co-Operative, RecVue, Saga d.o.o Beograd, TCI, TaskUs, University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics Authority, and Zeneral Heatpump Industry Co. Ltd. All told, Oracle claims to be processing 55 billion transactions a day on its cloud.
It may take a while for Oracle to catch up to AWS. But if it doesn’t achieve that goal it won’t be for a lack of development tools.
