Editor’s note: With incremental service improvements announced at its annual user conference, Oracle has cemented itself as a worthy opponent at multiple points in the cloud stack, says Technology Business Research. Plus: Video of chair Larry Ellison’s keynote. This is the second of a two-part report fro Oracle World. Part one is available online.

HAMPTON, N.H. – The times they are a-changin’ (sort of) at Oracle

During the Oracle World conference, attendees were bounced between the traditional keynote speakers that emphasized Oracle’s technical superiority over the competitor du jour (this was AWS’ second year of such a distinction), and more developer-level presenters that offered a refreshingly different tone.

Oracle made a lot of advancements in the PaaS layer to better support developers. Oracle executives suggest that Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is the only other vendor to have successfully transitioned from providing traditional on-premises software to the cloud. As such, Oracle followed and embraced open source (as Microsoft did with Linux), by not only opening Java EE but also announcing its new open-source serverless project “Fn.”

With a further emphasis on changing its reputation in the open-source community, Oracle discussed investments in CoreOS, Docker and Kubernetes through active participation and code contribution as it builds its container-native development offerings on these open technologies, candidly noting this was a different approach and that there was a lot of trust left to earn.

VIDEO: Watch Oracle Chair Larry Ellison’s Oracle World keynote at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faKWViY6zEk

Oracle’s Container Native Application Development strategy leverages containers, Java and serverless architectures to enable continuous integration and delivery. While all of the pieces of the pipeline are open for the developer to leverage what services they prefer, the system is optimized for Java and Oracle’s PaaS products including Managed Kubernetes, Wercker and Apiary, ultimately providing Oracle a means to both better enable the wanting Java developer community and make its paid-for platform services more relevant to those developers.

  • Customers can expect Oracle to continually advance its cloud capabilties

Customers at Oracle OpenWorld noted two key points that TBR believes validate Oracle as a budding cloud challenger. The first was the relative completeness of the Oracle Cloud Applications suite that came as executives celebrated the achievement of feature parity with capabilities launched across the EPM, SCM, CX and HCM suites.

This feature completeness, paired with the value add of Adaptive Intelligent Apps, elevates Oracle’s applications suite to a more competitive position against key SaaS players like Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) and Workday (Nasdaq: WDAY). The second key point was even more noteworthy as customers raved about the speed that the 25GB network gave to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services. Candid customer testimonials revealed a very real performance uplift for Oracle’s IaaS services that has already compelled some customers to choose Oracle’s IaaS over AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and/or IBM Bluemix, regardless of large free-credit offers.

Such compelling performance will undoubtedly win Oracle increasingly large workloads as it inserts itself into more IaaS opportunities.

  • Partners’ roles will shift to adding value as management need wanes

Oracle’s commitment to the automation of its underlying technology will have powerful implications for the partner community.

Those partners that host Oracle technology or have a soon-to-be “old-fashioned” applications management businesses should begin to shift their offerings from taking care of the Oracle stack to adding value to the deployment. The impact will become more pronounced the higher into the stack Oracle Cloud offerings are delivered. PaaS and SaaS should have their underlying cost structures rationalized with the automation and selfmanagement of the stack advances.

The implication for partners is that Oracle’s offerings are now easier than ever to compose and configure and they should get out of the integration and operations game.

TBR expects partners will vary in their response, with solution-led vendors seeing the value more quickly while infrastructure-driven partners fight to retain their legacy positions.

(C) TBR