Oracle has used the occasion of its Cloudworld event in New York to make a series of cloud-related announcements, including plans to expand its global data center footprint.
New regions will open in Reston, Va., London and Turkey during the first half of this year. More regions are slated to open in North America, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East between now and mid-2018, Oracle said.
The new regions will each contain at least three high-bandwidth, low-latency sites—or "availability domains"—that will be located several miles apart from one another and "operate in a completely fault-independent manner," according to a statement.
Oracle's cloud infrastructure now has 29 regions, and its expansion plans underscore a goal of showing enterprise customers around the world it can compete with Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Google when it comes to cloud reliability, latency and data sovereignty concerns.
What Oracle hasn't announced yet are arrangements like the one Microsoft has formed with Deutsche Telekom in Germany in the interest of meeting particularly high customer privacy demands. Under that pact, Microsoft data centers will deliver Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online, but customer data will be overseen and controlled by DT.
Oracle also made announcements related to new cloud services and functionality, including the availability of its database service on bare metal infrastructure, additional virtual machine sizing options, a load balancing service and enhancements to storage. (Full details are here.)
Companies in nearly 200 countries are using Oracle cloud services, ranging in size from large enterprises such as Pepsi, T-Mobile and GE to smaller organizations such as the University of Kansas, according to a statement.
It should be noted that to date, most of Oracle's cloud business consists of SaaS (software as a service) and not its PaaS (platform as a service) and IaaS (infrastructure as a service) offerings. The focus of this week's Cloudworld event on the latter two would seem to set the tone for Oracle's sales focus going into 2017.
Constellation views Oracle as keener on capturing new spending on IaaS and PaaS from its massive installed base, taking advantage of existing account relationships, versus winning business from greenfield opportunities (although surely it wouldn't turn down any such deals).
One piece of evidence for this comes from executives' constant drumbeat that Oracle applications written for on-premises use can be moved to the cloud without any changes. Oracle has set highly aggressive growth targets for its cloud business and to that end, customers can expect pressure from its sales organization but in turn, an opportunity to negotiate the most preferred terms as representatives look to close deals in Q3 and Q4.
As for Oracle, it might be a latecomer to IaaS but it's not too late, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. That's because the bulk of on-premises enterprise workloads have yet to move to the cloud. Meanwhile, it appears that Oracle is putting in the capital expenditures its IaaS offering has needed, Mueller adds.
"Pushing the overall game from generally accepted two datacenters in one location to three is a smart move and will help to overcome availability concerns for enterprise loads," Mueller says. "2017 will be make or break for Oracle."
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