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New Compute Cloud@Customer solution aims to bring Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) on-premises for enterprises and telcos that need to keep compute and data in their own data centers for regulatory, security or latency reasons.
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Oracle claims its competitors — such as AWS Outposts — only run a subset of cloud functionality on-premises, but Compute Cloud@Customer will run all the workloads OCI can run.
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Oracle does not show up on the chart of top five cloud providers drawn by Synergy Research Group this month.
After years of getting beaten badly by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google, Oracle has swept all the pieces from the board, turned over the table and smashed all the chairs. Metaphorically speaking.
The vendor is taking advantage of its unusual ability to provide customers with the whole stack — from the chip to the user click — to try to change the rules of the cloud game. That stack includes servers (and the processors inside them); infrastructure, including its own Linux operating system; database; and back office applications for a variety of business functions and industries, including sales, customer experience, supply chain, retail, hospitality and so forth.
In its latest move, the company on Wednesday introduced Compute Cloud@Customer, a single-rack hardware server to bring Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) on-premises for enterprises and telcos that need to keep compute and data in their own data centers for regulatory, security or latency reasons, particularly of interest to utilities, financial services and other highly regulated industries.
Oracle’s plan is for Compute Cloud@Customer to run any cloud-native and legacy apps that run in Oracle Cloud, using the same OCI services, APIs and management tools to deliver a consistent user experience everywhere. Compute Cloud@Customer complements the Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, which is specifically designed to run Oracle databases and runs on-premises.
Complements will get you everywhere
Additionally, Compute Cloud@Customer complements Oracle’s public cloud regions and its Dedicated Region — where Oracle builds a cloud region specifically for an individual customer. Dedicated Region scales from 12 to more than 450 racks and has been adopted by companies including Nomura Research Institute (NRI), Japan's largest consulting and IT solutions provider and Vodafone.
Oracle claims its competitors — such as AWS Outposts — only run a subset of cloud functionality on-premises, but Compute Cloud@Customer will run all the workloads OCI can run.
“Our strategy is to take OCI, not a shadow image, and bring it to the customer environment," Jason Schaffer, VP systems product management, told Silverlinings.
"We’ve shrunk that footprint to one rack for a single purpose. Our competitors will create a bifurcated system that’s not a full version of their public cloud,” he continued.
Here comes the trash-talk
Steve Zivanic, Oracle global VP, database and autonomous services product marketing, was feistier. “If you look at the actions of other cloud providers, their so-called commitment to on-prem cloud services is essentially non-existent and very limited,” he said.
Analysts were enthusiastic about Compute Cloud@Customer.
“After years of playing catch-up with their largest cloud competitors, Oracle has finally realized that to win, they have to rely on their existing strengths and offer capabilities that no other cloud service provider has at the moment,” Alexei Balaganski, lead analyst for KupperingCole Analysts, said.
Compute Cloud@Customer extends Oracle’s hybrid cloud support from Dedicated Region, which is affordable only to large enterprises, to small and medium-sized businesses.
“Considering the current economic and political situation, I would not be surprised that basically, every organization is dreaming about having their own private cloud with all the compliance and security benefits, but still enjoying the fairly low and predictable costs of public clouds,” Balaganski said.
Compared with other cloud providers’ on-premises hardware, Oracle is more focused on business requirements rather than technical details: Ease of running existing business workloads, universal management, support at no extra cost, configuration flexibility and lower overall costs, Balaganski said.
Integration with existing Exadata Cloud@Customer enhances security by isolating data from the data center and reducing the attack surface, he added.
Oracle faces challenges
However, although Oracle’s strategy is to offer the complete cloud experience on-premises, for now, only a subset is offered on Compute Cloud@Customer, which could limit its utility, Balaganski noted. Also, Cloud@Customer needs to maintain a connection to the public cloud or a Dedicated Region most of the time, making it a suboptimal fit for occasionally connected deployments such as oil rigs and ships, he said.
Oracle offers better price-performance than the competition, as well as the ability to dynamically scale to meet peak requirements using either pay-as-you-go or fixed pricing, Futurum research director Ron Westfall said.
Oracle is priced at $53 per core per month, compared with $84 for Google and $143 for AWS.
“It’s just making the experience more user-friendly, giving people more flexibility and options,” Westfall said.
Compute Cloud@Customer will help Oracle build on the “4th mover advantage” that Guggenheim analysts identified in March, combining price-performance and deep technology that will help it gain on entrenched competitors.
But Oracle still has a long way to go. The company does not show up on the chart of top five cloud providers drawn by Synergy Research this month.
Oracle is ignominiously lumped in with “Others,” although Synergy does cite Oracle as one of a half-dozen Tier 2 providers with fastest growth rates.
At time of publication, Oracle's stock (NYSE:ORCL) was trading down 1.98% at $112.95.