Oracle emerges from bureaucratic sludge clutching crucial cloud certificate

Oracle has gained a crucial federal certification that will make it easier for US government agencies to buy cloud services from the database giant.

The company announced it had gained a provisional authority to operate under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) on Thursday, almost a year after cloud rival Amazon gained its certification, eleven months after HP , ten months after IBM, seven months after Microsoft, and two months after VMware announced its own plans to pursue the valuable certification.

FedRAMP is a government-wide certification program that cuts the red tape agencies need to go through when procuring IT services. Once FedRAMP has been granted, other government entities need to go perform fewer specific evaluations on the tech before buying it.

Oracle launched its government cloud services back in September 2013 as part of a reversal by the company on its long-standing dislike of cloud.

By gaining FedRAMP for its "Managed Cloud Services," Oracle will be able to more easily sell government agencies on its strategically important suite of as-a-service tech.

The certification is "a critical milestone in Oracle’s efforts to implement and deploy secure private-cloud environments to our U.S. Government customers and partners," explained Rick Cirigliano, vice president of public sector for Oracle's Managed Cloud Services, in a statement.

Oracle's Managed Cloud Services come in three variants: Applications Managed Cloud Service (a management service "for any Oracle application"), Technology Managed Cloud Service (a way to get Oracle apps into the cloud), and Extended Managed Cloud Service (additional cloud-based services for existing on-premise apps).

With Oracle gaining FedRAMP it has screeched ahead of the current certification laggard, Google, which despite being on an enterprise push for its cloud has yet to gain the valuable slip of paper.

Though all the major IT services companies appear to have pursued or are pursuing certification, there may not be that much of a payoff: the Federal government is predicted to spend a mere $118.3m on public cloud tech this year and $1.83bn on private cloud. Money, yes, but not as much as we imagine these companies are used to. ®