Oracle is expanding its Cloud at Customer offering to now span all of its major PaaS categories and now some SaaS services.
Oracle Cloud at Customer has been available for over a year and the company says that it has already proved itself to be a popular choice amongst customers, with the likes of AT&T and Bank of America using it alongside other businesses across more than 30 countries.
Cloud at Customer is basically a way to help businesses to find a comfortable level at which they can get onto the cloud path. What this means is that businesses can choose what applications sit in the cloud, where they sit, and so on.
Oracle says that this is a big stumbling point for businesses looking to move to the cloud, given the growing number of regulations and data privacy concerns that they face.
Dermot O Kelly, SVP and Country Leader, UK, Ireland and Israel at Oracle said in a call with members of the press that, “some move to the cloud relatively easily, some mission critical systems they are not comfortable with moving because of regulations or the way they feel with the cloud.”
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At the heart of it is the desire to give the customer what they want, giving them the ability to pick and choose what sits where so that the customer is happy.
The expansion of Oracle Cloud at Customer sees the addition of the company’s major PaaS categories such as Database, Application Development, Analytics, Big Data, Application and Data Integration, and Identity Management.
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The underlying platform, which is based on converged Oracle hardware, software-defined storage and networking and IaaS abstraction has also been updated with faster CPUs and NVMe-based flash storage, in addition to all-flash block storage.
Customers will now also be able to choose some Oracle SaaS services such as ERP, HCM, CRM, and SCM in their own data centres. The Oracle Big Data Cloud Machine has also been added.
The business model of the offering is that customers can use all the public cloud services that they like but from their own data centres. It works like a public cloud subscription but with Oracle monitoring and managing the infrastructure and the same tools used in Oracle’s public cloud are used to provision resources.
Big Red say’s that it is the only offering from a public cloud vendor that delivers a stack that is 100% compatible with the public cloud but available on premises. Oracle provides all the hardware, and ships it at its own expense so that it can sit in the customer’s data centre.
To make it even more flexible, Oracle is moving from providing a quarter, half, or full rack to a kind of lego block style that can fit together.
Asked whether this update was focusing on getting new customers in to Oracle or shifting existing Oracle customers from its legacy portfolio, O Kelly said: “Both, certainly for the Cloud at Customer, that’s a very attractive offering for customers already using Oracle tech and starting their journey into Oracle. We’ve noticed in some of the SaaS applications that it’s opened up a new raft of customers because the barrier of price comes down using as-a-Service.”
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Asked whether this product advancement gives Oracle an advantage over the upcoming Microsoft Azure Stack, Nirav Mehta, vice president, product management, Oracle said: “This is a critical difference between us and anyone else, including the Azure Stack, all other solutions out there that attempt this require multiple vendors to come together.
“The Azure Stack needs hardware from elsewhere, software from Azure, and support from others. The technologically is cloud like, but for the whole service it falls short, doesn’t bring together all the composite elements.”
