Joe Panettieri, Former Editorial Director

January 30, 2013

2 Min Read
Oracle IaaS Private Cloud Meets Managed Services

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) continues to promote an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) engineered system (hardware and software) that customers can deploy on premises. Take a closer look, and the IaaS solution offers managed services provider (MSP) opportunities. Here’s why.

During a media call earlier this week, Oracle President Mark Hurd and Executive VP Thomas Kurian offered an update on Oracle’s business and cloud strategy.

At its core, Oracle’s public and private cloud strategy is to promote Exalogic and Exadata solutions in both scenarios. That way customers can move workloads between private clouds and Oracle’s public cloud with little effort.

I’m sometimes skeptical of private clouds because they can lack:

  • OpEx capabilities — many private clouds require customers to buy hardware and software outright, impacting CapEx budgets and not really providing predictable costs.

  • Elastic capabilities — can a corporate data center owner really scale their own IT operations up or down at a moment’s notice? Really?

Oracle is seeking to change that with its private cloud IaaS offering. Here’s how:

  • OpEx capabilities — Oracle says customers can pay-as-they-go for the on-premises IaaS solutions. Basically, customers “rent” the hardware, software and related services.

  • Elastic capabilities — I suspect that means customers can turn microprocessor cores on and off depending on potential needs. But I don’t think customers can “install” or “return” servers based on a whim. Also, customers can do bursting from on-premises private clouds up to Oracle’s public cloud.

So where do Managed Services fit in? Oracle will also provide remote managed services for the IaaS deployments, supporting things like patch management, application performance management and more. And yes, I’ve heard from two Oracle channel partners that are preparing their own managed services for the IaaS systems.

Admittedly, this isn’t an SMB market play. The Oracle Exadata and Exalogic hardware is designed for mid-market and large enterprise deployments. But there are plenty of MSPs that will be up to that task.

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About the Author(s)

Joe Panettieri

Former Editorial Director, Nine Lives Media, a division of Penton Media

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