Published on the 15/12/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
Oracle is finalising its plans ahead of launching an infrastructure as a service offering out of a Sydney data centre in the first half of next year…
Software giant Oracle is banking on the natural caution of large enterprises which are wedded to complex legacy platforms as its greatest ally in terms of carving out a slice of the lucrative Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market.
Gartner has noted previously that Australia really only kicked off its IaaS adventures in 2013, but since then Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine have sucked up the majority of workloads running in public cloud IaaS.
Earlier this year Telsyte’s Australian Infrastructure Cloud Computing survey for 2015 said that the value of the Australian IaaS market is just above $360 million and will approach $900 million by 2020 with annual growth of 16 per cent forecast to the end of the decade.
According to Amit Chaudhry, vice president of product management for Oracle cloud, who was in Australia last week, Australian and New Zealand customers will in 2016 be able to buy IaaS services from Oracle which will be provided out of a data centre in Sydney. At present Oracle co-locates its Sydney data centre, and Chaudhry suggested that might also be the approach when the local IaaS offer goes live next year.
Oracle has offered IaaS in the North American market for two years.
Chaudhry said that in essence Oracle was opening up access to the platform that Oracle itself used to support its SaaS and PaaS cloud solutions. But he said that unlike AWS or other IaaS providers which were focused on small business and startups, Oracle would focus its marketing efforts on large enterprises – the top 100 ASX organisations for starters.
“IaaS was initially aimed at startups and small companies, and Amazon did a pretty good job…but the reason that enterprises were much slower, and only gained traction in the last 18 months is because of their very complex legacy footprints.”
He said that the Oracle IaaS platform would allow enterprise customers to start moving their workloads into the cloud, but would not have to change their IT tools or skills to do so, while Oracle would also provide a range of services that run natively on its cloud, and offer hybrid cloud capabilities.
Oracle’s IaaS would be a “secular cloud” said Chaudhry, though he acknowledge that the “efficiencies will be higher if there is an underlying Oracle technology…most enterprises run Oracle databases.”
AWS, Microsoft and Google however no longer sell cloud just to start ups, and they do already control the vast majority of the global IaaS market, and will not see their market share eroded lightly. Oracle may find it has a fight on its hands.
