When Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison announced two new cloud services during a live Zoom event on July 8, he laid out a clear case for why businesses and governments will consider this next generation of “Cloud@Customer” services a “very big deal.”
Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison announced new Cloud@Customer services during a Zoom event.
Oracle1. Many large IT organizations—such as those at banks, government agencies, and pharmaceutical companies—still run most of their workloads on premises, instead of on public cloud infrastructure, because they need to keep data in their own data centers for regulatory, data sovereignty, latency, and other reasons.
2. Those enterprises are missing a huge opportunity to tap cloud-based innovations, especially autonomous technology. Oracle Autonomous Database technology lowers costs by reducing human labor, and it reduces security risk by eliminating human errors that can lead to security breaches, Ellison said.
3. Oracle’s new second-generation Cloud@Customer services give those organizations the benefits of cloud—such as pay-for-use, elastic capacity, and the latest technology updates—in a service that Oracle runs and maintains but that physically sits in their own data centers.
Cloud@Customer Extended
At the July 8 event, Ellison announced two new Oracle Cloud@Customer services:
The first, Oracle Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer, gives IT organizations access to Oracle’s breakthrough cloud-based autonomous database on an Exadata machine running inside their own data centers. Hundreds of organizations already use Exadata Cloud@Customer; this new service adds the Autonomous Database option, freeing database administrators and developers from mundane maintenance so they can focus on innovation.
Organizations pay only for what they use, with a minimum of $10,800 a month. “This is the first time our customers have access to the Autonomous Database in their data center behind their firewall,” Ellison said.
The second new service, Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, lets organizations run any Oracle Cloud service inside their own data centers. Oracle essentially builds a smaller version of its public cloud regions inside an enterprise data center. Customers must spend a minimum of $500,000 a month, with a three-year commitment.
With Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, customers now can run a wide range of cloud services in their own data centers, including apps such as Oracle Cloud ERP and HCM; Internet of things, blockchain, and Oracle Digital Assistant services; and raw cloud infrastructure, such as bare metal servers and GPU-powered servers for machine learning.
“Everything in the Gen 2 public cloud we drop and put inside your data center behind your firewall. And I mean everything,” Ellison said.
Organizations also can combine these Cloud@Customer services with Oracle public cloud services, and manage all of them on one console, Ellison said.
Best of Both Cloud Worlds
With all Oracle Cloud@Customer services, the hardware and data sit in an organization’s own data center. But Oracle manages the infrastructure, handling patching, updates, security, and technology upgrades via a remote connection.
The data never leaves the organization’s premises, and Oracle teams don’t have access to customer data. Customers pay the same rate they would for Oracle’s public cloud services (with a minimum), get the same service-level agreements for reliability and performance, and can access all of the same services available in the Oracle public cloud.
Second-Gen Clouds Are Autonomous
In setting up the importance of the new Oracle Cloud@Customer offerings, Ellison explained in depth how autonomous technology is the defining feature of Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud infrastructure.
“We call our cloud a second-generation cloud because of one thing—because of autonomous services,” Ellison said. “The difference between a generation 1 cloud and a generation 2 cloud are these autonomous services.”
Oracle launched the Autonomous Database in 2018, followed in 2019 by Autonomous Linux, which lets Oracle do things like patch every server in its cloud automatically, without downtime to customers’ workloads. On July 8 Ellison also announced the coming availability of Oracle Autonomous Data Guard, which automatically provisions a standby copy of a customer’s production system in a different data center, for disaster recovery.
“All of our autonomous services are enabled by a revolutionary new technology called machine learning,” Ellison said. “Machine learning is probably the most important new technology in the last decade of computing.”
In addition to emphasizing the security, labor savings, and reliability benefits of Oracle’s autonomous services, Ellison also keyed on the speed and performance benefits of running Autonomous Database on Exadata. He described Oracle as “obsessed” with making the database run fast—and gave a simple reason.
“Because time is money inside of the public cloud,” Ellison said. “If you're paying by the minute, and we run twice as fast, we cut your bill in half.”
The preceding is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, timing, and pricing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products may change and remains at the sole discretion of Oracle Corporation.
