Oracle expands cloud infrastructure portfolio, eyes partner cloud market

Oracle has expanded its cloud infrastructure portfolio with an offering that will enable partners such as systems integrators and telcos to sell and deliver cloud services to their customers.

Dubbed Alloy, the cloud infrastructure platform, announced at the company’s CloudWorld confab in Las Vegas, lets Oracle partners offer a full set of cloud infrastructure and platform services tailored to the needs of specific markets and industries.

Partners can run Alloy independently in private datacentres, and fully control its operations to address regulatory requirements, such as those of the public sector and other industries that may want to keep workloads in their own countries and operate their cloud services independently.

It also supports software and hardware extensibility, enabling partners to provide compute services powered by different types of hardware such as graphic processing units, Arm processors and even mainframes to address the needs of specific workloads.

“Giving our partners and customers more choice has long been a primary focus for OCI [Oracle Cloud Infrastructure],” said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice-president for OCI. “We’re going one step further by providing our partners with the option to become cloud providers so that they can build new services faster and address specific market and regulatory requirements.

Chris Kanaracus, research director at IDC, noted that Alloy’s ability to extend OCI’s infrastructure and platform services to partner-controlled environments could appeal to customers who “increasingly want cloud environments that live closer to them, whether for performance, growing data sovereignty reasons or simply to leverage familiar relationships with existing trusted service providers”.

“They also want cloud services tailored for their industries,” he said. “Moreover, at IDC, we increasingly see the cloud as not something tied to a specific location, but rather a consistent operating model for IT. Oracle Alloy reflects these trends.”

Tomoshiro Takemoto, senior executive managing director of Japan’s Nomura Research Institute (NRI), which is using two OCI dedicated regions to run mission-critical workloads, said Oracle Alloy would “not only make it easier for our customers to build and run their own applications and services, but also enable us to better integrate our own financial applications and customers’ systems”.

Besides empowering partners to become cloud suppliers, Oracle is bolstering their ability to extend Oracle Fusion applications with additional capabilities through an application development platform that they can use to build user experience, telemetry and search components, among others.

Separately, Oracle expanded its MySQL Heatwave cloud database service to Microsoft Azure, enabling users to perform both online analytics processing and online transaction processing on data stored in Azure. This follows a similar service for Amazon Web Services that was launched in September.

It also added new developer services for building cloud-native apps, pre-trained artificial intelligence (AI), data services and low-code development, as well as services to improve security, observability and developer experience.

According to Gartner’s April supplier report, the adoption of Oracle’s cloud products by existing and new customers has gained momentum, which has been highlighted by revenue growth over recent quarters.

“Growth has been primarily driven by cloud offerings such as autonomous databases and, more broadly, OCI, with a higher percentage of revenue coming from recurring subscriptions,” it noted. “This is helping Oracle with increased revenue scale and deferred revenue.”

Sid Nag, vice-president analyst at Gartner’s technology and service provider group, said Oracle’s investment in its cloud infrastructure offerings over the years had enabled it to achieve feature parity with other hyperscalers.

“Like Microsoft, Oracle has applications, middleware, databases, infrastructure, compute and storage to containerisation, serverless functions and AI,” he told Computer Weekly. “They have finally established themselves differently, and other market leaders are going to face stiff competition.”