Oracle today announced it will make available as a managed service in on-premises IT environments all of the software it currently provides access to on Oracle Cloud.
In addition, Oracle is making available Oracle Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer, which brings a managed database service to the Exadata servers optimized to run Oracle databases. Oracle also announced it has certified Siebel, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards applications for Oracle Autonomous Database along with the availability of Oracle Autonomous Data Guard, a managed high-availability and disaster recovery service that ensures near-zero data loss (RPO) and instant recovery times.
Vinay Kumar, senior vice president for cloud engineering in North America at Oracle, said while cloud service provider rivals have made some services available in on-premises IT environments, Oracle will be the first to deploy a full range of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications via an Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer service.
Priced starting at $500,000 per month, Kumar said the Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer service is intended to appeal to organizations that because of compliance requirements need to deploy applications in an on-premises IT environment but still want to be able to treat IT as an operational expense.
Kumar also noted in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic there are more organizations that would prefer to rely on a service to remotely manage Oracle applications rather than having to set up and manage the networking infrastructure necessary to let IT staffs manage those applications from home.
Like existing Oracle Cloud services, Kumar said Oracle applications can be deployed on virtual machines, bare-metal servers or Kubernetes clusters. In some cases, Oracle expects IT teams will opt to deploy some applications on-premises while also taking advantage of the existing Oracle cloud services.
It’s not clear to what degree organizations will shift to relying on vendors to provide managed services versus ether deploying and managing applications themselves or relying on managed services provided by third-party IT services firms. Historically, less than 20% of all IT is consumed as a managed service. However, in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the pandemic, it’s expected more organizations will prefer to treat IT as an operational expense. Oracle is now making it possible to make that decision regardless of where its applications are physically deployed.
As applications become consumable as a service anywhere the distinction between what constitutes a cloud service running locally versus in data center owned by some other entity will start to dissipate. Many workloads that make the same application are likely to be running in different locations based on the sensitivity of the data being processed. Regardless of the path forward, the days when “the cloud” applied to only some external service are finally coming to an end.
