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Innovation

Oracle's cloud computing plan: Bring services to customers on-premises

Oracle is launching an effort called Oracle Cloud at Customer to capture workloads behind the firewall on its infrastructure. It's quirky idea crazy enough to capture some hybrid cloud spending.
Written by Larry Dignan, Contributor

Oracle is launching a new cloud service that will be installed in a customer's data center with a pay-by-usage model.

The family of offerings is called Oracle Cloud at Customer and is aimed at enterprises that want to move critical applications to the cloud and adhere to privacy and security regulations.

For Oracle, the cloud-at-customer effort is a unique spin on the hybrid data center and allows the vendor to straddle the on-premise and as-a-service shifts.

Cloud-at-customer offerings are priced based on subscription and align to what Oracle already charges for its services. The sales pitch for Oracle revolves around bringing the cloud to the customer. The service will be managed by Oracle.

Amit Zavery, senior vice president for Oracle Cloud Platform, said the company came up with its architecture to extend its public services in private data centers due to customer requests. "We're enabling customers to have the features of the cloud and pricing model inside their own data centers," said Zavery. "There's a lot of IT spending behind the firewall."

Key points include:

  • The cloud service in a customer data center allows enterprises to control data and meet various sovereignty and residency requirements.
  • Workloads will be portable between on-premise and cloud.
  • Oracle's cloud will run all workloads.
  • Applications, databases and middleware will run behind the firewall.
  • Customers will get updates as if they were using the public cloud.

While Oracle's effort sounds like it's a managed service, the company maintains that it is bringing its public cloud to the customer. Zavery said Oracle is running the same hardware it uses for its cloud at a customer data center. "A managed service is customer centric and specific," explained Zavery. "This is the public cloud and not specific to any one customer. It's an extension of Oracle Cloud."

The lead offering is the Oracle Cloud Machine, which has Java and integration cloud services as well as infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service. The Cloud Machine is available today and Oracle said it also include Exadata Cloud for database workloads and a Big Data Cloud.

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