Oracle's public cloud arrives in Australia as it escalates competition with AWS and Microsoft

As part of its ongoing strategy to compete with AWS and Microsoft, Oracle has brought its Oracle Cloud Platform services to Australia.

Oracle has been expanding its cloud capabilities for years, with customers using the cloud delivered from different regions. This latest move marks the first time infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) are being provided from within the Australia and New Zealand region.

Although Oracle's regional managing director Rob Willis was not able to share the name of the co-location provider in partnership with Oracle, he revealed that the facility was located in Sydney.

Willis also told CRN that these services are being provided from a different facility and different provider from the company's SaaS services, which have been provided since 2012.

"This is the first time we are able to provide all services from within the region," Willis said. He added that in addition to solving latency issues, the move was important to customers who had concerns about where their data was located. 

Focused initially around data management, application development and integration, as well as compute and storage, the new services will help users reduce cost and complexity, utilise digital solutions and innovate and transform their businesses. 

According to Willis, the combination of all these services is of real value to partners and customers.

"You can also get a whole range of platform tools, mobile cloud and other services and this is where the value is for many customers, solving business problems," Willis told CRN.

Willis said this was also good for small businesses using services out of the cloud as it provided "great value" and was "easy to access".

Oracle’s IaaS enables customers to deploy both Oracle and non-Oracle workloads on the cloud.  As well as delivering lower latency and local data residency, customers will also benefit from the full integration Oracle Cloud enables, according to the vendor.

"For example: spinning up new application development on IaaS, integrating that with database management PaaS services, or extending existing SaaS offerings to enable them to better address business needs," Oracle said.

Users have been able to use Oracle Cloud at a customer site to deploy Oracle Cloud Machine for IaaS and PaaS services within their own data centres. Oracle claims to be the only vendor to provide a "true hybrid offering in this market" by complementing these services with the public expansion.

There has already been interest from channel partners, including ASG Group, Avnet, Deloitte, Insight, NeoData Australia, NextGen and UXC Red Rock. 

ASG Group chief operating officer and financial officer Dean Langenbach said: "ASG are proud to be one of Oracle’s first channel partners to spearhead the adoption of the Oracle’s Public Cloud services. We are currently working with one of our large customers to transform the delivery of their core financial and reporting applications.

"The benefits that will be realised for our customers include a fully scalable, globally accessible platform, a simplified and optimised technology stack, and lower operating costs. We are looking forward to continuing to be a driving force in the adoption of leading technologies to leverage the benefits of this locally deployed Public Cloud offering," Langenbach added.

UXC Redrock chief executive Philip Milne said: "The local provision of Oracle’s platform and infrastructure services is an exciting development.  It will remove one of the final barriers related to data sovereignty, and will accelerate customers adoption by making the transition to Cloud even more effortless."

In January, Oracle announced its expansion plans to compete with the industry's leaders by adding three new regions in the first half of 2017, with one in Virginia, USA, London and Turkey.

This expansion has doubled the regional presence of Oracle's cloud platform in the last 24 months, with 29 regions available globally, according to Oracle. At the time, the vendor announced additional regions planned to go online through mid-2018 in North America, the Middle East and APAC.