Telecom Italia (TIM) has added another major US partner to its recently launched cloud and edge computing venture, Noovle.

The Italian operator said it has signed a collaboration agreement with Oracle as part of a plan to offer cloud services for enterprises and public sector organizations in Italy. The latest move comes only a few months after Noovle and TIM signed a partnership with Cisco for the development of cloud activities.

The addition of Oracle is notable since it brings another cloud infrastructure provider into the fold. Noovle is one of Google Cloud's main partners in the Italian market, for instance.

James Crawshaw, a principal analyst with Omdia (a sister company to Light Reading), indicated that TIM could have chosen Oracle because of its public sector focus.

"Oracle and IBM do win business and do have certain aspects of their solutions that seem to be better for some scenarios – governments seem to like Oracle a lot," Crawshaw said.

The Italian operator is clearly accelerating its bid to grab a slice of the increasingly attractive enterprise cloud market, offering public, private and hybrid cloud services. TIM will use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to migrate mission-critical data management workloads to the public cloud.

In addition, it will deploy Oracle Fusion Cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) to optimize its finance and supply chain processes and help grow new revenue streams.

TIM said Oracle’s hybrid and multi-cloud strategy aligns closely with its objectives in ensuring that all customer data is hosted in-country and customers have a cloud solution that meets their data sovereignty needs.

Howdy partners

TIM acquired Noovle in May 2020 and formally launched it in January 2021, with the aim of becoming an "Italian center of excellence for cloud and edge computing."

Noovle is ultimately expected to operate a network of 17 data centers distributed across the country — comprising seven existing data centers, four service centers and six data centers that Noovle has been tasked with building for TIM.

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Noovle’s partner roster is steadily expanding: As well as Cisco, Google Cloud and Oracle, Noovle also lists Accenture, Atos, Citrix, Dell, Microsoft Azure, Salesforce, SAP, Veeam, and VMware as partners.

TIM has previously indicated that partners will benefit from its participation in the GAIA-X project — the European Union's cloud-computing "moonshot" project that is seeking to establish common standards for storing and processing data within Europe.

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— Anne Morris, contributing editor, special to Light Reading