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Official document reveals the rules of Oracle's cloud

Analysts: Oracle cloud services customers should be mindful of the fine print

By Chris Kanaracus, IDG News Service, 12/14/12

Page 2 of 2

"Oracle's stated reason here is to ensure that any such monitoring tools do not adversely impact the cloud services," he said. "However, it would seem to also preclude a low-impact automated script running in the customer's own data center to merely ping the cloud system, say, once a minute, to ensure that the system is available and to notify the customer if it is down. This [policy] seems to me to go beyond what is necessary." Customers should push for the right to independent monitoring during contract talks, Scavo added.

Another eye-opener for Scavo was the fact that Oracle reserves the right to perform "major changes" to its cloud infrastructure up to twice a year. "Each such change event is considered planned maintenance and may cause the Cloud Services to be unavailable for up to 24 hours," the document states. Customers with the most stringent high-availability needs should take special heed of this clause, Scavo said.

Customers would be wise to make sure they get in writing that Oracle will suffer some agreed-upon penalty for falling short of its service availability pledge, according to Scavo.

Many early adopters of Oracle's Fusion Applications are going with the cloud deployment option, at least in part because of the complexity involved with installing them on-premises.

Oracle is taking a careful approach to selling Fusion, telling customers now running its E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, and PeopleSoft applications that they can adopt the new software at their own pace.

But given the monumental effort Oracle put into developing Fusion Applications, it seems apparent that over time, it hopes to move the bulk of its installed base over to them. Thus, the way Oracle defines its cloud services policies could get even closer scrutiny over time.

An Oracle spokeswoman declined to comment for this story.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris' email address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.