Oracle unveiled a new service that promises to make all of its public cloud services available as a fully managed cloud region in its customers’ data centers, developed by an Oracle team based largely in the company’s Seattle engineering office.
Announcing the new “Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer” service in a virtual event on Wednesday afternoon, Oracle executive chairman, CTO and co-founder Larry Ellison called out the company’s cloud rivals in his trademark competitive style. Oracle is now unique, he said, in offering all of its current-generation cloud services, including its Autonomous Database and Software as a Service apps, in customer data centers.
“No one, not Amazon, not Microsoft, not Google, nobody gives you a complete public cloud, behind your firewall, dedicated to you,” Ellison said during the Zoom presentation, highlighting a recent customer win for the venerable database technology company. “This is a first in the cloud industry.”
To be sure, those companies have plenty of technologies for running components of what would otherwise be public cloud services in their data centers, in co-location facilities or on-premises. Amazon Web Services’ Outposts and Microsoft’s Azure Stack are two of the leading examples. And Ellison, who founded Oracle more than 40 years ago, has been known to make eyes roll with grand proclamations about his company’s products.
But one sharp-witted observer, who hasn’t been shy about criticizing Ellison, calls the move legitimately novel and interesting, and better in some ways than what Amazon is doing.
“View it this way: if I have workloads that can’t run in the public cloud for whatever reason, these options are very different,” said Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist at The Duckbill Group and the host of podcasts about AWS and the cloud. “With AWS Outposts, I’m limited to a pale shadow of what the full public AWS region offers (a small subset of the service offerings are available), radically different compliance / SLA guarantees, etc. As was announced today, Dedicated Regions are a full copy of an Oracle Cloud region.”
“Now, don’t get me wrong: AWS regions are significantly more robust, durable, etc. than their Oracle Cloud equivalent,” Quinn said. “But if you’re okay with OCI’s [Oracle Cloud Infrastructure] durability guarantees and availability model, this is arguably one of the best possible ways to get there.”
Quinn pointed out that AWS offers a full cloud region behind a customer’s firewall, as well, in special circumstances such as its “Secret Region” for the U.S. intelligence community and its bid for the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI contract (which Microsoft won, and both Oracle and Amazon disputed in different cases). But those custom arrangements would typically cost billions.
In that way, Quinn disagreed with sentiments expressed in The Register about the pricing of Oracle’s service. The company is requiring a minimum commitment of $500,000 a month, or $6 million a year, in consumption over three years. That’s “chump change” compared to what a big customer would pay Amazon for a custom cloud behind a firewall, Quinn said.
In addition, he noted, Oracle’s approach could be an alternative path for some companies to migrate from data center to the cloud, effectively making the transition behind the firewall. “This isn’t Lift and Shift, it’s Shift and Lift,” he said.
The San Francisco company, traditionally known for its database technologies, has been trying for years to make headway in the cloud against Amazon, the public cloud leader, as well as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Ellison name-checked Amazon or AWS a total of 30 times during his presentation, but Amazon isn’t commenting publicly on Oracle’s announcements. The company has been continuing to build out AWS Outposts, including an announcement this week that customers can create Amazon Relational Database Instances on AWS, and the previous expansion of Outposts into Africa, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East.
Oracle named two customers who are using the Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer service: Japanese management consulting and economic research firm Nomura Research Institute; and Oman Information Technology and Communications Group.
