Oracle Unveils More Cloud Deals
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Oracle Corp. made a batch of partnership and expansion announcements this week as it digs in to compete in the cloud infrastructure wars.
The company (NYSE: ORCL) said Thursday (May 4) it was collaborating with VMware (NYSE: VMW) to develop new security and management features for enterprise applications running on Oracle's mobile cloud service. Those tools would be provided via VMware's AirWatch platform, the partners said.
Separately, Oracle said AT&T (NYSE: T) would move internal databases and applications workloads to its cloud infrastructure and platform services. The partnership calls for the telecom giant to migrate thousands of its existing Oracle databases along with associated application workloads to the Oracle cloud.
Reflecting the scale of the massive transfer, the partners are calling the petabyte-scale shift "Exadata as a Service."
Meanwhile, Oracle unveiled cloud expansion plans with a move into the German market. Oracle's extension into the European Union's largest economy, including infrastructure and platform services, builds on an earlier rollout into the U.K. region.
Oracle said the German cloud region is scheduled to come online during the second half of this year.
Other overseas expansion plans announced this week include the addition of new partners for Oracle's network cloud service called FastConnect. The program provides cloud connections via "points of presence" around the world.
Among the new partners is datacenter connectivity giant Equinix (NASDAQ: EQIX), which has extended its collaboration with Oracle to include cloud infrastructure services. Other partners include telecom and broadband providers British Telecom (NYSE: BT) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ). FastConnect aims to "remove barriers to cloud adoption by providing additional options for connectivity to Oracle Cloud from trusted enterprise datacenters," the company said in a statement announcing the partnerships.
Other deals unveiled this week included new cloud customer, Trek Bicycle, which said it was shifting its legacy customer service and distribution functions to Oracle mobile cloud service. The deal also would allow the high-end bike manufacturer to expand its dealer network, the partners said.
Oracle, which is battling Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN), Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL), IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) for a larger share of the public cloud market, portrayed the new partnerships as evidence of, according to Thomas Kurian, Oracle's president of product development, "tremendous growth across our cloud business" as it expands it global reach.
In an effort to beef up its cloud software offerings, Oracle acquired Netsuite last fall for $9.3 billion. With completion of the merger, Oracle recently announced a series of product expansions based on the deal, including AI-based enterprise applications running on its cloud service. Those services focus on human resources functions and customer service.
