HITS

Oracle to ‘Significantly Expand’ Cloud Infrastructure Footprint

Oracle used its annual CloudWorld conference in New York Feb. 12 to announce the planned expansion of its current regional cloud infrastructure footprint, demonstrate advancements that have been made in autonomous cloud, and say it’s extending autonomous capabilities across its entire Oracle Cloud Platform.

“Driven by strong customer demand for its cloud services worldwide,” Oracle will “significantly expand its modern cloud infrastructure footprint,” it said in a news release. Oracle’s “rapid expansion plans” call for the opening of 12 new datacenter regions and an increase in the “breadth and depth” of Oracle Cloud services available across Asia, Europe and the Americas, it said.

The plan stands to strengthen Oracle’s “industry leadership position, delivering a complete and integrated portfolio of cloud services — including Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) — as well as new services in security, blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI), it said.

“The future of IT is autonomous,” Oracle CEO Mark Hurd said in the announcement. “With our expanded, modern data centers, Oracle is uniquely suited to deliver the most autonomous technologies in the world,” he said, adding: “As we invest, our margins will continue to expand. And with our global datacenter expansion, we are able to help customers lower IT costs, mitigate risks and compete like they never have before.”

The expansion of Oracle’s cloud footprint will include China, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Amsterdam, Switzerland and North America, including two locations in Canada and two new U.S. locations to support U.S. Department of Defense workloads, Oracle said.

Thomas Kurian, Oracle president of product development, demonstrated the latest advances in Oracle Cloud Platform at the conference. In expanding its Oracle Cloud Platform Autonomous Services beyond the Oracle Autonomous Database, the company is making all Oracle Cloud Platform services self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing, it said. Oracle is applying AI and machine learning to its “entire next-generation Cloud Platform services to help customers lower cost, reduce risk, accelerate innovation, and get predictive insights,” it said.

As organizations concentrate on the delivery of innovation quickly, “they want a secure set of comprehensive, integrated cloud services to build new applications and run their most demanding enterprise workloads,” Oracle said, adding that only its cloud services “can automate key operational functions like tuning, patching, backups and upgrades while running to deliver maximum performance, high availability, and secure enterprise IT systems.”

In addition, to accelerating innovation and smarter decision-making, Oracle Cloud Platform is “incorporating additional autonomous capabilities specific to application development, mobile and bots, app and data integration, analytics, security and management,” the company said.

“The future of tomorrow’s successful enterprise IT organization is in full end-to-end automation,” Kurian said, adding: “At Oracle, we are making this a reality. We are weaving autonomous capabilities into the fabric of our cloud to help customers safeguard their systems, drive innovation faster, and deliver the ultimate competitive advantage with smarter real-time decisions.”

Oracle’s autonomous capabilities are “integral” to the entire Oracle Cloud Platform, including the world’s first autonomous database unveiled at Oracle OpenWorld, it said.  The Oracle Autonomous Database uses advanced AI and machine learning to “eliminate human labor, human error and manual tuning delivering unprecedented availability, high performance and security at a much lower cost,” it said.

Multiple autonomous database services, each tuned to a specific workload, will be available starting in 2018, including Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud Service for analytics, Oracle Autonomous Database OLTP for transactional and mixed workloads, and Oracle Autonomous NoSQL Database for fast, massive-scale reads and writes, the company said.

Oracle Cloud Platform autonomous capabilities for application development, mobile and bots, integration, analytics, security and system management are scheduled to be available in the first half of 2018, the company said.

Oracle also announced that it “expanded the breadth and depth of its enterprise service level agreements” (SLAs), saying that will deliver a “superior experience for customers” and help enterprises that are looking to “shift critical workloads” to the cloud.

“Building on the strength of its recently announced, industry-leading 99.995 percent availability guarantee” for Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle unveiled what it said was “the industry’s first end-to-end financially backed cloud warranty for IaaS. “With these comprehensive SLAs, Oracle is now the only cloud infrastructure provider offering guaranteed service levels across performance, manageability, and availability: the three key characteristics defining how enterprises measure cloud infrastructure providers,” it said.