Oracle promises bigger margins as it chases cloud's big three
Vendor to expand its cloud infrastructure footprint with 12 further datacentres, while intelligent automation also moves up its agenda
Oracle plans to open 12 datacentres around the world as it accelerates its cloud focus to chase the tails of the space's biggest players.
Last year Oracle's UK channel boss told CRN it was in the same league as cloud's big three - Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google.
Oracle's CloudWorld event has this week added drive to those aims, including revealing details of 12 datacentres.
"The future of IT is autonomous. With our expanded, modern datacentres, Oracle is uniquely suited to deliver the most autonomous technologies in the world," said Oracle CEO Mark Hurd.
"As we invest, our margins will continue to expand. And with our global datacentres' expansion, we are able to help customers lower IT costs, mitigate risks and compete like they never have before."
The datacentres will be spread across the globe, with two European locations in Amsterdam and Switzerland. Elsewhere there will be Asian datacentres in China, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and South Korea, alongside further centres in the US and Canada.
"You would expect headline-grabbing cloud news at Oracle's own CloudWorld event and that is what it provided but with an intelligent automation theme Oracle added another page to a cloud story that is already packed with infrastructure, platforms, data and applications," said Angela Eager, research director at TechMarketView.
"OpenWorld last autumn saw the announcement of Oracle's machine intelligence-driven autonomous cloud database (18C), CloudWorld this week saw it joined by autonomous PaaS in the form of Oracle Autonomous Cloud Platform.
"Like 18C it promises to reduce day-to-day drudgery by tackling the time and cost commitments of launching, running and maintaining cloud services. It will start rolling over the spring."
Eager said that while the autonomous services encourage enterprises to invest in Oracle cloud from top to tail, there is no getting away from the reality that it does have a powerful cloud stack and strong cloud story that is moving on at pace, even though it is still a small contributor to overall revenue.
"The advances make for an increasingly compelling proposition for existing Oracle customers but it is still a major decision for non-Oracle houses," she said.
"Add in the 12 new datacentres Oracle is planning and the cloud proposition deepens alongside its desire to be seen as a competitor to AWS, Microsoft and Google.
"It has some way to go before it will be on terms with AWS and Microsoft is particular regarding datacentre assets and cloud market share, however," added Eager.