Oracle finds a way to operate in countries that demand more local control of the cloud

The cloud-computing industry is growing quickly, but the global regulatory environment and industry priorities are changing just as fast. In a lot of places, countries and companies want more control over cloud services than public cloud providers are willing to give them. 

Oracle Cloud is trying to turn that challenge into an opportunity with a new service called Oracle Alloy. The new platform gives customers a way to use Oracle Cloud services without having to cede control over operational decisions. 

Customers will be able to staff the operations of the platform themselves with local citizens, for example. They’ll also be able to control the cycles of operations, such as the scheduling of software changes and updates. 

“This creates that independence from Oracle that some countries and some industries are really looking for,” Oracle Cloud VP Leo Leung said to ZDNET ahead of the Oracle CloudWorld conference. “They don’t want a cloud service that is managed by a US provider, and they don’t want that level of dependence on Oracle.” 

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In regions with heavier regulatory requirements, “there are markets that are underserved,” he said. “We think there’s a big opportunity to serve some of those underserved markets with a local provider or a regional provider.” 

The Oracle Alloy offering is designed for customers such as large system integrators or a managed service provider, like a software vendor. 

A systems integrator, for instance, may be managing hundreds of thousands of customer applications in data centers. Moving to Alloy would help them automate their management processes in the cloud, moving from a CapEx business model to OpEx. A software vendor, meanwhile, might serve a market like the financial services industry, delivering a number of Oracle Cloud services via Alloy. Companies using Allow can use their own branding to deliver services to their own customers, hiding the Oracle brand behind their own.  

As Oracle Cloud seeks to expand its reach with new services like Alloy, it’s also building a bigger physical footprint. The company announced plans to open new public cloud regions in Chicago, Serbia and Mexico. Oracle Cloud already operates 40 commercial and government regions across 22 countries on five continents.

Meanwhile, Oracle is announcing ways it’s working more closely with Nvidia at CloudWorld. Oracle will support the Nvidia AI Enterprise software suite on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, giving Oracle the ability to build bigger clusters and manage larger AI environments. The two companies together will target specific industries like healthcare. 

“We think there’s a lot of room to continue to improve software in the cloud, to help any organization, no matter what size they are, take advantage of machine learning and AI capabilities,” Leung said.