Oracle, like fellow traditional enterprise vendors such as SAP, is on a journey to transform into a cloud services company. But while the business intelligence giant is already well along its way in transitioning to a software-as-a-service model, CEO Larry Ellison’s plans to diversify his firm’s revenue streams beyond on-premise licenses and legacy maintenance contracts are only now beginning to take shape as a cohesive strategic vision.

Oracle marked the latest milestone in its efforts on Monday with the introduction of two new public cloud services that plug into existing deployments of its software. The announcement comes three months after the database maker entered a partnership with Verizon to let joint customers to use their existing licenses on the latter’s infrastructure-as-a- service instead of having to rent software for an additional monthly fee.

Oracle Database Backup, one of the new offerings unveiled this week, is a disaster recovery solution that the vendor says allows enterprises to keep remote copies of their transactional information at a fraction of the cost of operating a dedicated facility and with a comparable level of security. The feature that sets it apart is integration with the Oracle Recovery Manager, which enables users admins to perform off-premise backups using the same environment they have been using for in-house operations.

Oracle Database Backup offers a purpose-built alternative to Amazon S3, much like VMware’s new Disaster Recovery service, which made its debut this morning. The firms are pursuing the same strategy against AWS, targeting the few remaining holes in its portfolio and leveraging their ubiquity in the enterprise as a stepping stone towards the hybrid cloud.

The other offering Oracle revealed on Monday is an object storage service that directly competes with S3 and touts a similar promise of simplicity and lowered costs. However, the solution’s main differentiator is not price – although that’s a certainly important factor – but rather the fact that it provides API support for the Swift component of OpenStack, functionality that is currently not available with AWS and probably won’t be for the foreseeable future.

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