Oracle updated its distributed cloud portfolio and launched a new cloud platform dubbed Oracle Alloy to provide service providers the same functionality as full cloud providers.

Oracle Alloy builds on the provider's dedicated regions cloud service that lets customers deploy Oracle's cloud infrastructure and use its cloud tools and services in a specific location. The Alloy platform takes those efforts "a few steps further," Oracle VP of Products and Strategy Leo Leung told SDxCentral in an interview.

The platform allows service providers to offer a full set of cloud services, tailor the offerings, brand them to match the enterprise more broadly, and create packages of other value-add services or applications that will fit their specific customer audience.

"We'll deploy a region for that customer to a location of their choosing. But in addition we'll offer new services and tools to enable them to customize the environment so they can change the look and feel," including the ability to change pricing and rate cards, he explained. Oracle will also offer customer relationship building and management with the Alloy platform. "If they don't have their own, they can use our tools to maintain those customer relationships."

The vision for Alloy going forward is to offer more extensibility through services that support Alloy users to build their own cloud services native to the Oracle cloud. "For example, there [are] a lot of managed service providers that have their own orchestration and performance management software that they show their customers so the customers can see what's running in the hosted environment. That can easily be built into Alloy and offered as a service by these partners," he said.

The Alloy platform also allows customers to maintain total control of their operations, if they choose. "They can staff with specific people, both the operations as well as the customer support. And, again, that gives these partners the ability to meet varying degrees of either regulated market standards or certain countries and their data privacy and data sovereignty standards," he explained. "This dramatically extends our ability to serve even more customers through partners."

Oracle also announced automated cloud migration and disaster recovery services for enterprise customers. These features identify virtual machines (VMs) in a customer's environment before automating the planning and migration of those VMs to the cloud. The provider's automated disaster recovery service is then able to provide additional security by automating the creation of a second, identical cloud environment in an alternate cloud region.

This gives customers a variety of options, Leung explained. They can either replicate their entire environment in the case that the first environment is no longer available and "just fail over to the second," or they can create what he described as a pilot live version, where customers maintain a minimal footprint in a second site.

"If something happens with the first site, this service will automatically spin up all the other things that are necessary to run the application in the other site, which means that the ongoing costs are very low. They just have one VM running on the other side, and only turn it on when they need it," Leung explained. "This is going to be really helpful because it just automates everything."

In terms of following the industry trend toward multicloud, "we're expanding the access to some of our services through not just Azure, but also AWS," Leung added, referencing the MySQL HeatWave service now natively available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and upcoming availability on Microsoft Azure as part of Oracle's database service for Azure.

"We're going to continue pushing along the abilities to run Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) [and] leverage our cloud services no matter where the customer wants them – whether it's in the public cloud, or across clouds, or in specific locations," he added.

Oracle plans to expand its public cloud regions globally. "We're at 40 now, and the goal is to continue to expand into more locations for those that want public cloud," Leung said. Beyond that, the provider's newly introduced sovereign cloud regions in the European Union (E.U.) are another significant piece of its expansion strategy. "This is additional regions in the E.U. that satisfy sovereignty requirements like having local citizens run the infrastructure and having certain local entities controlling that infrastructure," he explained.