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Some people may think that Oracle took a tip from Yoda of “Star Wars” in naming its latest customer-services cloud Oracle Cloud at Customer.
Yoda, of course, used to say things like “Luminous beings are we” and “Wars not make one great.” In any language usage, Oracle’s purpose is pretty clear: Take advantage of the cloud and all its shortcuts, yet keep your company’s data locked up right at home where it belongs.
Oracle on July 19 announced expansion of the breadth of services available through the Oracle Cloud at Customer. The portfolio now spans all of the major Oracle PaaS categories, and, for the first time, features Oracle SaaS services.
Since its introduction last year, the company said, Oracle Cloud at Customer has seen substantial growth with global organizations across six continents and more than 30 countries adopting the solution, including AT&T and Bank of America.
It’s All About Removing Data Storage Constraints
Oracle Cloud at Customer is designed to enable organizations to remove one of the biggest obstacles to cloud adoption: data privacy issues related to where the data is stored. While organizations generally want to move their enterprise workloads to the public cloud, many have been constrained by business, legislative and regulatory requirements that have prevented them from being able to adopt the technology.
These first-of-a-kind services provide organizations with choice in where their data and applications reside and a natural path to easily move business critical applications eventually to the public cloud, Oracle said.
However, having a centrally managed cloud service like Cloud at Customer also means that if one buys into the Oracle model, it’s all about the Oracle model—there’s no easy way to utilize any of the Cloud at Customer tools and applications for multiple or cross-cloud workloads.
It also requires that the infrastructure platform is based on converged Oracle hardware, software-defined storage and networking and IaaS abstraction; so there are major hardware investments to consider.
Oracle fully manages and maintains the physical and virtual infrastructure at customers’ premises. This is the same cloud infrastructure platform that powers the Oracle Cloud globally.
New PaaS, SaaS Services Now Available
As of July 19, customers now have access to all of Oracle’s major PaaS categories, including Database, Application Development, Analytics, Big Data, Application and Data Integration, and Identity Management. These services take advantage of specific enhancements that have been made to the underlying Oracle Cloud at Customer platform, such as servers with faster CPUs and NVMe-based flash storage, as well as all-flash block storage to deliver even better performance for enterprise workloads, Oracle said.
Oracle for the first time also has made available in Oracle Cloud at Customer the ability to use Oracle SaaS services, such as Enterprise Resource Planning, Human Capital Management, Customer Relationship Management and Supply Chain Management in their own data centers.
Also newly available is the Oracle Big Data Cloud Machine, an optimized system delivering a production-grade Hadoop and Spark platform with the power of dedicated nodes and the flexibility of a cloud offering. Organizations can now access a full range of Hadoop, Spark and analytics tools on a simple subscription model in their own data centers.
Listing of New Cloud Services
Oracle Cloud at Customer now features the following Oracle Cloud services:
- Infrastructure: Provides elastic compute, containers, elastic block storage, object storage, virtual networking, and identity management to enable portability of Oracle and non-Oracle workloads into the cloud.
- Data Management: Enables customers to use the database to manage data infrastructure in the cloud with the Oracle Database Cloud, including Oracle Database Exadata Cloud for extreme performance and Oracle MySQL Cloud.
- Big Data and Analytics: Empowers an entire organization to use a single platform to take advantage of any data to drive insights. Includes a broad set of big data cloud services, including Oracle Big Data Cloud Service, Oracle Analytics Cloud, and Oracle Event Hub Cloud.
- Application Development: Enables organizations to develop and deploy Java applications in the cloud using Oracle Java Cloud, Oracle Application Container Cloud, Oracle Container Cloud, and Oracle WebCenter Portal Cloud.
- Enterprise Integration: Simplifies integration of on-premises applications to cloud applications, as well as cloud application to cloud application integration using Oracle Integration Cloud, Oracle SOA Cloud, Oracle Data Integrator Cloud, Oracle GoldenGate Cloud, Oracle Managed File Transfer Cloud, and Oracle Internet of Things Cloud.
- Security: Enables organizations to use Oracle Identity Cloud to implement and manage consistent identity and access management policies.
- Software-as-a-Service: Provides organizations with a complete suite of software to run their businesses, including Oracle ERP Cloud, Oracle CX Cloud, Oracle HCM Cloud, and Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud.
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