Oracle Corporation’s ORCL chief technical officer Larry Ellison announced the launch of Oracle Database 12c Release 2 as well as inclusion of more than 20 new cloud based products and applications into the company’s Cloud@Customer line of subscription services during the Oracle Open World 2016.

Introduced six months ago, the Cloud@Customer line of products will now feature services such as Big Data Cloud Machine@Customer, Exadata Cloud Machine@Customer and Infrastructure Cloud Machine@Customer among others.

What Sets Cloud@Customer Apart?

Oracle Cloud@Customer differs from the original Oracle Cloud in the sense that the customer’s own data center hosts the hardware so as to address security and sovereignty issues. In terms of convenience and pricing, both the services are on par with one another. Both the services are available on a subscription basis and are entirely managed by Oracle.

While citing the details of the new products, Ellison said that customers won’t be required to purchase the technology and can simply subscribe to the services on a month-to-month basis. He also said during the event that the products are more powerful and less costly than Amazon.com Inc.’s AMZN cloud services.

Others in the Fray

As per many technology analysts, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is considered to be the market leader in the cloud computing space. Additionally, per a Gartner report, Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service alone holds more than twice the data than the next seven biggest cloud service providers taken together.

Apart from Amazon, Microsoft Corporation MSFT, and Salesforce are the two other companies that Larry considers as major contenders in the cloud services space.

Our Take

Unlike AWS, which only works on the Amazon cloud, Oracle’s Cloud@Customer gives the subscribers the freedom to set up their own on-premise data centers and have access to the cloud at the same time, which is also referred to as the “hybrid cloud.” We note that Microsoft Corporation also supports this kind of technology.

Given the flexibility that Cloud@Customer offers, we expect Oracle to do well in the cloud computing space in the coming years.

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Zacks Rank & Key Picks

At present, Oracle carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

A better-ranked stock in the broader technology space is Avid Technology, Inc. AVID, sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

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