Oracle brings second-gen cloud to Australia

Oracle has announced that it’s about to give its Australian cloud an upgrade.

The software colossus announced its “Generation 2 Cloud” in October 2018, and emphasised security as its main feature. The service delivers security by placing customer code, data, and resources on a bare metal computer, but cloud control code lives on a separate computer with a different architecture.

Oracle argues that without this sort of separation, cloud operators could peer at users’ data. Its cloud now also offers AI-and-ML tricks to detect threats, automated analytics and the Oracle Autonomous Database, and says that plus its isolation tech all adds up to superior security.

And now it has also announced that it’s Gen 2 cloud “is planned to go live in Australia by the end of the August with the opening of a new region in Sydney.”

Oracle’s announcement of the new region included quotes from local partners who like the idea of getting their hands on the company’s newest cloud.

ASG Group CEO Dean Langenbach was quoted as saying “Being able to leverage the additional performance, speed and security that Oracle’s next-generation infrastructure brings, will help us deliver even greater value, innovation and security to our customers; especially in regulated industries like the public sector and financial services.”

And DXC Red Rock practice director Richard James said “DXC Technology believes the Generation 2 Cloud data centre will provide new and exciting opportunities for our customers. The major priority for many of our customers is moving existing applications to the cloud and we’re confident that Oracle’s Gen 2 data centre in the Sydney region will help them to embark on a long-term journey and realise increased performance, security, scalability and cost savings.”

All of which is lovely. But the scoreboard tells a different story: analyst firm Gartner recently listed the top five IaaS and PaaS players and Oracle didn’t make the list. The form also opined that Oracle will never be perceived as a general-purpose provider of integrated IaaS and PaaS because it was late to market and lacks scale.

The firm also said Oracle has a "polarising nature" and that makes it hard to recruit the developers who are so influential in cloud adoption choices.

On the upside, Gartner said Oracle’s cloud will appeal to customers who use its other wares.