Oracle has achieved the prestigious distinction of being recognized as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services, formerly identified as Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services. The recognition from Gartner underscores Oracle’s commitment to excellence in the rapidly evolving landscape of strategic cloud platforms.
Gartner defines strategic cloud platform services as encompassing standardized, automated public cloud offerings that integrate infrastructure services (such as computing, network, and storage), platform services (including managed application and data services), and transformation services, which are essential resources aiding customers in the adoption of cloud-oriented IT delivery models.
Clay Magouyrk, the executive vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), expressed the significance of this recognition, stating, “We believe this recognition further demonstrates Oracle’s growth in this key category and places OCI among the four global hyperscale cloud providers in the Leaders Quadrant.” Magouyrk emphasized Oracle’s unique distributed cloud strategy designed to meet diverse customer needs, addressing the expanding global demand for OCI.
Oracle’s portfolio encompasses Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings. This broad spectrum enables customers to exercise greater choice in deploying and managing applications, whether across different clouds or within a distributed system. The flexibility inherent in Oracle’s services facilitates compliance with data sovereignty and other regulatory requirements, making OCI a preferred choice for organizations of varying sizes.
OCI has recently introduced powerful distributed cloud offerings to the market, including notable additions such as Oracle Database@Azure, Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud, and MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse on AWS. The increased adoption of Oracle Alloy, an award-winning cloud infrastructure platform, attests to the platform’s innovative capabilities, with organizations like TEAM IM and Nomura Research Institute, Ltd. (NRI) leveraging OCI to innovate at the pace of hyperscalers.
The distributed cloud model of OCI ensures that customers have access to over 100 OCI cloud services with consistent pricing and location flexibility, offering unparalleled versatility compared to other public clouds. With 46 public cloud regions across 23 countries, including two EU Sovereign Cloud regions, OCI is adept at addressing data residency and sovereignty requirements. Oracle also operates separate government clouds in the U.S., U.K., and Australia, along with Isolated Cloud Regions for U.S. national security purposes. Customers have the added flexibility of running OCI cloud services in their own data centers, while partners can customize branded cloud services using Oracle Alloy.
The collaboration between OCI and Microsoft Azure is a testament to Oracle’s commitment to enhancing cloud migration. The upcoming availability of Oracle Database@Azure in the East US region, starting December 2023, will allow customers direct access to Oracle database services running on OCI deployed in Microsoft Azure datacenters. This collaboration aims to deliver the combined advantages of Oracle Database on OCI, including performance, scale, and workload availability, with the security and flexibility offered by Microsoft Azure.
Oracle’s integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into cloud applications on a best-in-class AI infrastructure is a key differentiator. OCI provides a robust framework for training and serving models at scale, bolstered by a partnership with NVIDIA. This collaboration enables OCI to offer customers superclusters powered by the latest GPUs and an ultra-low-latency RDMA over converged ethernet (RoCE) network. Additionally, OCI delivers high-performing generative AI models, leveraging Cohere’s advanced large language models and enhanced with Oracle’s industry knowledge and data insights. Oracle has seamlessly embedded these generative AI services across its cloud applications, industry applications, and database portfolio, allowing customers to harness the latest innovations within their existing business processes. The recently introduced OCI Generative AI service further enhances OCI’s AI capabilities, providing developers with a collection of services equipped with prebuilt machine learning models, simplifying the application of AI to various business operations.