Oracle ups ante in cloud wars with dedicated customer regions

Oracle is shaking up the cloud computing market in a radical move that will enable enterprises to run an entire cloud region in their own datacentres.

Dubbed Dedicated Region Cloud at Customer, the Oracle managed service will bring all of Oracle’s second-generation cloud services, including its autonomous database and cloud-based applications, from $500,000 a month.

Cherian Varghese, Oracle’s regional managing director and vice-president for ASEAN and growing economies in South Asia, said the new offering is aimed at enterprises in regulated industries that want all the benefits of public cloud, including global roll-outs of software upgrades and patches, while meeting data residency and latency requirements.

“For those in the financial sector and government, putting everything on a public cloud is not the best goal,” Varghese told Computer Weekly. “That’s where bringing the public cloud datacentre into their own datacentre became an idea.”

That led Oracle to introduce the Cloud at Customer offering several years ago, but that service focuses mainly on delivering a single service, such as Exadata Cloud at Customer, which effectively puts an Exadata database machine in a private datacentre along with consumption-based pricing.

By contrast, Dedicated Cloud at Customer is much bigger in terms of scale and usage, said Varghese. “It gives access to over 50 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure [OCI] services, the compute, storage, block, data science – everything we have available on OCI.”

Price-wise, Varghese said enterprises only pay for services they choose to consume, based on the same prices for Oracle’s public cloud services. They can also continue to use existing Oracle tools such as budgets, cost analysis, invoices and usage reports to monitor and audit usage of Dedicated Region Cloud at Customer.

However, the minimum committed spend is pegged at $6m a year, which enterprises can use towards any services available on Oracle Public Cloud, said Varghese.

By deploying Dedicated Region Cloud at Customer, enterprises will get a virtual zone – with its own security fabric and disaster recovery capabilities – in their datacentres, said Varghese. “It creates its own domain, and nobody is allowed to enter that domain. Even the physical security is isolated so that nobody enters or exits that particular place.”

To ensure enterprises can scale up their use of services delivered through Dedicated Region Cloud at Customer, Oracle will first conduct a datacentre site and workload analysis during the prequalification process. 

“What are the products and workloads? What is your peak intensity of your workload?” said Varghese. “Assuming your organisation is growing by 10 times, can I put 100 times growth into a box? We will plan in such a way that the infrastructure will be able keep that momentum going.”

Deepak Mohan, research director at IDC, said that with Dedicated Region Cloud at Customer, Oracle is delivering a slice of its public cloud experience into customer datacentres, with no changes in pricing or capabilities.

Describing the new service as a “game-changer for large-scale digital transformation efforts”, Mohan said it represents a new direction for public cloud suppliers, which have historically offered only limited versions of their services to customers’ premises.

One of the first adopters of Dedicated Region Cloud at Customer in Asia-Pacific is Japan’s Nomura Research Institute (NRI), a management consulting firm.

“With Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud at Customer, we can use Oracle Exadata as a cloud service and achieve greater agility, such as seamless expansion, while maintaining high availability at the same level as on-premise,” said Tomoshiro Takemoto, senior corporate managing director at NRI. 

“Built in our own datacentre, it also enables us to not only provide SOC 2 [Service Organisation Control 2] report based on Japanese security standards in financial industries, but it also allows us to access broader cloud services and tools provided by Oracle and further increase our business value for our customers. By relying on Oracle to operate an on-premise environment, we will be able to invest more resources in our digital transformation.”

Across the ASEAN region, Varghese said Oracle is eyeing customers that are already seeing the benefits of Cloud at Customer, including infrastructure cost savings and service-level guarantees. “I believe those customers who have already gone on that journey will naturally give us a good pipeline,” he said.