Oracle OpenWorld, held in the first week of October, officially heralded the company’s acceptance of cloud as the new reality for the enterprise. And with the company’s announcement that the next version of its flagship database will include a new architecture called ‘pluggable databases’, Oracle seems to now be on a path that none of its major competitors have taken so far. Oracle arguably right now has the most vertically integrated stack for the new cloud economy: IaaS from Sun/Solaris m PaaS from Fusion middleware and these new pluggable databases, and applications from its product lines ranging from Peoplesoft and Siebel to Taleo.

Oracle can now provide a bundled offering to enterprises that includes traditional ERP systems all the way to some of the latest enterprise social apps. Add to that Oracle’s explicit adoption of the mobility trend, and suddenly Oracle seems like it wants to be the one-stop shop for the enterprise. This approach raises questions on multiple levels. First, does a full enterprise stack really mean much in the era of the cloud, where seamless interoperability is an aspect considered right from the design phase of an application? If it does (maybe for applications requiring low latency), then is the pluggable database approach the most efficient way forward? And finally, will the sales juggernaut of Oracle need to be rejiggered to extract maximum customer lifetime value for the company’s broadening multi-product stack, with many of the products not being the best ones in the market? After years of not embracing the cloud, Oracle has now turned a corner, but is still behind players like Amazon, Salesforce and Microsoft. Which means we now have a serial acquirer with a serious interest, and that might be a good thing for cloud startups!