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Oracle opens second Australian datacentre

A new datacentre, housed at an Equinix facility in Sydney, will the address data sovereignty concerns of Oracle customers, according to the vendor's Global President Mark Hurd
Written by Spandas Lui, Contributor

Enterprise software vendor Oracle has launched its second datacentre in Australia to address customer demand for hosting content locally.

Oracle set up its first datacentre operation in Australia in 2010 with its on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) platform, which was hosted out of a facility owned by Harbour MSP.

Speaking at a press conference in Sydney, Oracle's global president, Mark Hurd, said that the second datacentre will support the company's strategy to build out the cloud, as well as address data sovereignty concerns from its local customers.

"We hope you will also look at it as an investment into the Australian market, and it shows our commitment to this market," he said.

Oracle's Fusion Applications, which include enterprise resource management (ERP), human capital management, customer service and support, as well as sales and marketing applications, will be hosted out of the second datacentre as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. Oracle is also serving up platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings.

As with many cloud products, Oracle can scale capacity in real-time depending on the demand of the customer it is servicing. Hurd noted that the vendor is also able to mix and match its offerings should customers want to host a portion of its Oracle applications on-premise or in a private cloud.

The datacentre went live at the start of 2013, and some customers are already operating out of it. The facility is owned by Equinix and uses Oracle Engineered Systems, including Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Exadata Database In-Memory Machine.

Oracle did not reveal the pricing for its cloud services.

Several big names in the tech industry, including Microsoft and Amazon, have come out to dismiss concerns over data sovereignty. Microsoft has said that it believes data sovereignty in Australia is an imaginary issue, claiming data protection laws are better in the US.

As for companies worried about hosting its content in the US due to the Patriot Act, Amazon has said that the Act is less severe than data-access laws in many other countries.

Hurd sidestepped questions over where Oracle, as an entity, stands on the concept of data sovereignty, but said that it is important to address issues that worry its customers.

"If the customer has concerns about data sovereignty, then it's a concern for us," he said. "We have the flexibility to satisfy that."

"When I hear those arguments [against data sovereignty concerns], more times than not, at the core of that argument is somebody making an argument because it's all they've got — they try to convince you to buy what they currently have."

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