Oracle insists it's serious about the cloud

Oracle has ramped up its cloud ambitions with the launch of three new regions over the next six months as well as a new developer event and enhancements to its Cloud Platform.

While AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have been relatively quiet over the first few weeks of 2017, Oracle is stepping up in the cloud arena with new data centres in Virginia (US), the UK and Turkey. The team state the new regions will be online in mid-2017, taking the footprint to 29 globally. Additional regions are planned to come online in APAC, North America, and the Middle East through mid-2018.

“Oracle is committed to building the most differentiated Cloud Platform that delivers on the requirements of a wide array of customer workloads,” said Deepak Patil, VP of Development at Oracle Cloud Platform. “This regional expansion underscores our commitment to making the engineering and capital investments required to continue to be a global large scale cloud platform leader.”

While it is a company which has been making a lot of noise recently, would you expect anything else with Larry Ellison involved, Oracle has been playing catch up. Oracle was a late player to the cloud market, seemingly believing it to be a passing fad, and is now in the slightly suspect position of throwing money around to compensate for the sluggish start. Alongside marketing campaigns and conference speaking tours to justify its position, it has been on the acquisition trail.

The top four in this market is currently set with AWS leading the pack, Azure a distant second, with Google Cloud and IBM further back again. Oracle is entering the market at the right time as cloud computing begins to make its move into the mainstream market, though whether Oracle can make a meaningful move on the top four or if it will remain as an also-ran remains to be seen. Money can talk very loudly and Oracle has plenty of it, giving it a chance.

Alongside the launch of the new regions, the team has also announced the availability of the Oracle Database Cloud Service on bare metal compute, and new virtual machine compute, load balancing, and storage capabilities.

“These latest investments in the Oracle Cloud Platform provide a clear path to develop, test, and scale applications – with the Oracle Database or third-party databases,” said Thomas Kurian, President of Product Development at Oracle. “We offer customers the most comprehensive approach to moving to the cloud and accelerating their business strategies.”

Oracle is one of those established organizations, like Intel and IBM, which has the cash to bully an industry, though it could be a case of too little too late now. The top four are miles ahead of the chasing back, and aren’t waiting around for the rest to catch up. Each of the leaders are releasing hosts of new features, acquiring new businesses all over the place, opening new data centres and hiring the best and brightest.

In its desperation to make up lost ground Oracle even launched a new developer event series – Oracle Code – which is free to attend. Oracle seems finally to have the desire to compete in the top leagues of the cloud world, but sometimes wanting something isn’t enough.