Oracle Looks to Manage Hybrid Clouds

As part of an effort to advance hybrid cloud computing deployments, Oracle today unveiled a bevy of managed services offerings for on-premises IT environments that mirror existing Oracle cloud services.

Amit Zavery, senior vice president of Oracle Cloud Platform, says the Oracle Cloud at Customer portfolio of services provides instances of everything from IT infrastructure and databases to applications and multiple types of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments that are completely managed by Oracle on behalf of the customer. Once invoked, it then becomes much simpler for those IT organizations to also invoke complementary cloud services that are similarly managed by Oracle on their behalf, says Zavery. Each of those services can scale up and down as needed and are priced using the same model as public cloud, adds Zavery.

“Customers can think of Oracle Cloud at Customer as an extension of a public cloud,” says Zavery.

This latest offering of services from Oracle underscores some of the challenges many IT organizations will face trying to manage hybrid cloud computing deployments on their own. Whether they do it themselves or rely on Oracle, it is much simpler to manage a hybrid cloud consisting of a common set of homogeneous elements. It also serves to differentiate Oracle from rivals, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), that remain resolutely opposed to on-premises application deployments.

Zavery says many organizations are now making the decision to rely more on managed services provided by a vendor so they can concentrate more of their efforts on developing applications that advance digital business transformation initiatives.

There’s no doubt that most IT organizations are moving toward hybrid cloud computing. Less clear is to what degree they are willing to give up control of the underlying IT technologies that enable cloud computing, especially if the total cost of a managed service over an extended amount of time exceeds the total cost of acquiring and maintaining cloud platforms themselves. In either scenario, Oracle is making a case for a homogeneous approach to hybrid clouds that it can manage on behalf of the customer, or simply provide access to public cloud services as an extension of an on-premises environment that remains in the hands of a local IT organization.