There is no denying that cloud technology has flourished in recent years as enterprises shift from physical to digital infrastructure. According to Chris Morris, Vice President at IDC Asia/Pacific, “By 2024, in response to performance, security and compliance requirements, 50% of organisations will implement dedicated cloud services either on-premises or in a service provider facility.”
In a recent session focused on the momentum of Oracle Cloud in ASEAN, Ying Loong Chin, Regional Managing Director at ASEAN & SAGE, was joined by the IDC analyst to discuss the happenings of the current cloud market.
Hybrid and multi-cloud are the future, claims Morris, as the power of decision for organisations have shifted from IT teams to business managers, changing the criteria for cloud providers. This shift indicates a repositioning of priorities as organisations prioritise applications and workload SLAs over cost.
On Oracle’s side, Chin has stated that “multi-cloud is the new normal,” pushing their Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with a complete suite of integrated applications obtained through innovation and various acquisitions. These include OCI’s partnership with Cloudflare and the introduction of HeatWave with MySQL Autopilot in OCI. Oracle’s strategy of having access to these value-added vendors and their flexible approach to cloud infrastructure plays into the shift that Morris touched on in his presentation.
Among the efforts that Oracle has made to attract more customers to their cloud service has been to expand their reach globally through the addition of new regions. In November of 2021, Oracle’s expansion into Singapore proved to be fortuitous as the company reports more than 100 organisations have chosen to host their workloads on OCI. These include FUJIFILM, iFoundries and the City Government of Baguio, Philippines.
OCI’s leading proposition values include ease of migration to the cloud, access to service developers, autonomous services, hybrid cloud support across various strategies, built-in security and superior price performance. Chin includes a chart from independent comparisons from Storage Review and Accenture in his presentation comparing Oracle OCI Bare Metal, On-Premises All-Flash Array and AWS i3.metal, which indicated that Oracle performed better than the other two on Microsoft SQL, Oracle Database, VDI and mixed workloads. With better performance, Chin shared that Oracle topped other vendors price-wise too. Oracle “is the only cloud provider offering financially backed, end-to-end SLAs,” states Chin. Emphasising their cloud solution was built for the enterprise.
In terms of hybrid cloud strategy support, Oracle allows its customers to choose between Oracle Public Regions, Dedicated Regions, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, Exadata Cloud@Customer and Roving Edge Infrastructure. These decisions were made to provide Oracle customers with “complete on-premises IT environments on cloud.”
Other attractive OCI benefits include Oracle Cloud Lift, Oracle Cloud Rewards, and Always Free Services. Oracle is also providing free OCI training and certification until the 28th of February 2022.
From the session alone, Oracle’s developments in their cloud innovation have grown largely even though they entered the game late in 2016. Whether they will be able to beat their hyper-scale competitors is another story. As the cloud market in ASEAN is currently fiercely competitive with multiple cloud providers popping up, it will be interesting to observe Oracle’s growth in the region.