Oracle envisions a holistic cloud offering eliminating the multiple vendors that are commonly involved in cloud deployments today, a streamlining that should translate into lower costs for customers, which might particularly resonate with federal CIOs.
Oracle's cloud stack includes a full complement of business process applications, including budgeting, financial reporting and planning, as well as human-resources tasks such as payroll and recruiting.
Doolan also stressed that Oracle's cloud software would continue to support the company's existing applications as long as they remain in use, such as PeopleSoft, Siebel and the E-Business Suite.
"It's not just the new stuff. It has to work with the old stuff," he said.
Oracle's latest efforts in the cloud, announced at the company's recent OpenWorld conference with the promise of a fourfold performance increase, also come as a bid to remain relevant in the fast-evolving IT sector, Doolan acknowledged.
"If we don't bring to market those kinds of economies of scale with these systems, we are going to be relegated to the Compaq/Tandem/Wang/DEC history of our industry very, very quickly, so that keeps us awake at night," he said.
In vying for government cloud business, Oracle is pushing deeper into a crowded market where big firms like Amazon, Salesforce, Google and Microsoft are all competing for share.
Kenneth Corbin is a Washington, D.C.-based writer who covers government and regulatory issues for CIO.com.
Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline, on Facebook, and on Google +.
Read more about cloud computing in CIO's Cloud Computing Drilldown.
