Oracle expands availability of cloud services from UK datacentre region

Oracle has confirmed an expansion of its UK datacentre region, with the immediate availability of a wider range of cloud platform and infrastructure services hosted from it.

Oracle customers can now access locally hosted versions of the firm’s flagship database software, as well as its cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain-based offerings, as well as its bare metal compute instances and block storage offerings.

James Stanbridge, vice-president of product management for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) at Oracle across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), said the announcement is a show of the company’s continued commitment to investing in its cloud datacentres across the globe.

Previously, this has seen Oracle publicly commit to growing its UK datacentre footprint in January 2017, paving the way for opening its government-focused cloud region several months later.

“It is a significant new region, and what our strategy has been very consistently over several years is to build new regions and cloud capabilities exactly where and when customers need them to meet their growing needs to complete the transformation of their IT to cloud,” said Stanbridge.

“These are services that can be utilised by just about any of our customers. So we have some of our born-in-the-cloud startup customers, right through to the enterprise and public sector scale of our businesses.”

To reinforce this point, the company is touting the National Grid as a beneficiary of its expanded UK cloud region, along with the likes of the UK Home Office, Lloyds Banking Group and Birmingham City University.

“Our customers in the UK, and globally, are growing ever hungrier for cloud services,” said Richard Smith, senior vice-president for technology, covering the UK and Ireland and Eastern Central EMEA.

“They completely understand how the cloud can transform their businesses. Today’s announcement is a cornerstone in our strategy to support our customers, new and old, as they look to innovate in the cloud.”

The company is far from alone in its push to build out its datacentre presence in the UK, as its cloud competitors – Amazon, Microsoft and Google – have all made a concerted effort in recent years to tap into the demand for locally hosted cloud services in this way.