In the Top 5 Cloud Trends for 2020, Principal Analyst Claus Mortensen observed that 2020 is a do-or-die year for Oracle if they wanted to remain as a key contender in the Cloud market. Mortensen said, “Oracle has not been able to break into Cloud in the same way as their competitors and has so far not made the same “leap of faith” into this area as similar companies have. Unless the company makes a clear decision about their Cloud strategy and succeeds in communicating it to the market in 2020, Oracle may quickly find itself more of a niche Cloud player going forward.”
Oracle’s intentions to remain one of the leading global Cloud providers becomes clear as they actively expand their global coverage. Last week Oracle announced that, as part of their ongoing regional expansion plan, they have added local regions in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), Melbourne (Australia), Osaka (Japan), Montreal (Canada) and Amsterdam (The Netherlands). This expands the reach of Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud to 21 independent locations, and Oracle intends to further add 15 locations by the end of 2020. At OpenWorld last year, Oracle had announced their plans to have Cloud sites dedicated to the enterprise market as well as government customers.
Dr Alea Fairchild, Principal Advisor Ecosystm, thinks that Oracle appreciates the needs of their enterprise customers. “Oracle understands the sensitivity of the enterprise to the location and availability of their data, which remains an issue with Cloud implementations involving large data sets. They have broken some ground as the first public Cloud vendor with data centres in Saudi Arabia, and are putting efforts in to offer a minimum of two regions in almost every country in which they operate,” says Dr Fairchild. “From a corporate user’s perspective, regional data management and appropriate licensing models are still sensitive spots when it comes to database management.”
Getting Ready for the Hybrid Cloud Market
Oracle also appears to be ramping up for the growing hybrid Cloud market. Ecosystm research shows that more than a third of global organisations have adopted the hybrid Cloud and this will only increase. Given the increased uptake of hybrid and multi-cloud environments, Oracle offers preconfigured links between Oracle and Microsoft Azure cloud regions in the eastern states of the US, London, and Toronto, as part of the Cloud interoperability partnership announced in June 2019. Last year, saw another mutually beneficial partnership between VMWare and Oracle, that supports their customers’ hybrid cloud strategies, allowing the VMware Cloud Foundation to run on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Organisations can also avail technical support for Oracle software running in VMware environments both in on-premise data centres and Oracle-certified cloud environments.
“Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud is now available in 21 locations and is on track to have a total of 36 Cloud regions up and running by the end of the year,” adds Dr Fairchild. “But when compared to AWS, Microsoft and IBM, Oracle still holds a fraction of the market share. They can be seen as a niche infrastructure provider, but indeed the partnerships with Microsoft and VMware are set to help Oracle’s Cloud business make traction with companies that are adopting multi-cloud strategies.”
