Oracle targets cloud sovereignty concerns with Australian data centre

Enterprise applications provider Oracle has made a significant play for the Australian government and enterprise cloud-computing market with the establishment of a new data centre in Sydney.

The new facility, to be hosted within the enterprise-grade Equinix data centre, will host a range of software-as-a-service (SaaS), and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud-computing offerings for businesses and government agencies that have traditionally shied away from cloud offerings due to concerns about data being stored offshore.

Customers will be able to access the services on a subscription basis, with self-service access to Oracle Fusion Applications offering hosted, full-service SaaS platforms for enterprise resource planning (ERP), human capital management (HCM), talent management, sales and marketing, and customer service and support.

Oracle's PaaS range will initially be built around a hosted instance of the company's eponymous database which, like the SaaS offerings, will be managed on an ongoing basis by Oracle technicians.

The platforms are based on Oracle Engineered Systems – a range of pre-built application appliances, built on Sun Microsystems servers, that Oracle offers to enable rapid expansion and implementation of its applications.

Appliances to be offered through the Sydney facility include the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud – a scalable platform for business applications – and Exadata Database In-Memory Machine, a high-end data warehouse and database cloud platform designed to scale rapidly to support customers' changing cloud-computing requirements.

This makes oracle's offering roughly analogous to the EC2 and S3 offerings of cloud giant Amazon Web Services (AWS), which recently moved into the Australian market with a local offering targeted at countering ongoing concerns about data sovereignty.

"Cloud computing is transforming the way Australian organisations approach IT by providing an alternative delivery [method] that supports agility and innovation," Oracle ANZ regional managing director and senior vice president Ian White said in a statement.

"Oracle Australia's second data centre demonstrates Oracle's ongoing commitment to offering cloud solutions to our customers. The centre will help customers to continue to meet government regulatory requirements and help to ensure sovereignty of sensitive data." – David Braue