Oracle extends cloud options with Alloy launch

Oracle is giving cloud control to its partners and customers with the launch of Oracle Alloy, an infrastructure platform that lets organizations build and deploy custom cloud services using their own hardware and data centers.

The Alloy platform is built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the vendor’s portfolio of IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and other cloud services.

“Oracle has spent a lot of money and effort to build out OCI. They’re really keen on growing share, and they’re going after programs like Alloy aggressively to do so,” said analyst Chris Kanaracus, a research director in IDC’s worldwide infrastructure practice. “Oracle is incentivized to be as appealing to customers – on economics and flexibility and localization – as possible.”

Alloy is primarily geared for service providers, integrators, and ISVs that want to roll out Oracle cloud services to their customers. With Alloy, a provider can essentially white-label OCI and offer branded infrastructure and platform services to its customers.

There’s a case for enterprise adoption as well, particularly by companies that are subject to stringent data residency, security and regulatory requirements.­ In these instances, the appeal of Alloy is that it gives an enterprise control over where cloud workloads reside and how they’re managed. Organizations in healthcare or financial services, for example, might deliver applications and services tailored to specific regulatory conditions.

Oracle is giving its partners and customers the option to become cloud providers so they can build new services faster and address specific market and regulatory requirements, said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, in a statement. “As cloud providers, our partners have more control over the customer experience for their targeted customer or industry, including where the workloads reside and how their cloud is operated,” Magouyrk said.

Oracle already offered its Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, which is aimed at organizations with demanding latency, performance, and data-residency requirements. OCI Dedicated Region lets an enterprise deploy Oracle’s public cloud services (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS) in an on-premises environment – but it’s a managed service, operated by Oracle.

Oracle Alloy offers greater control. Alloy can be independently operated in a provider’s or enterprise’s own data center. The organization controls staffing and operations and can add branded or customized cloud services.

Oracle announced the new Alloy offering at its CloudWorld conference going on this week in Las Vegas.