Telefónica Spain has signed off on a "multi-year collaboration" deal with Oracle to host database software from the vendor's on-premises cloud environment.

According to the official announcement, Telefónica is going to migrate the "bulk" of its Oracle database systems to "Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer." The upshot is that Spain's incumbent will build a dedicated on-premises cloud platform to support delivery of new services, as well as house Telefonica's "mission-critical operational and commercial systems." In short that means BSS and OSS platforms.Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer is pitched as an on-premises deployment option of Oracle Exadata Cloud Service, which is delivered as a managed cloud service in Telefónica's own data centers.

But why bother making the change? Telefónica says it's because it can consolidate those mission‑critical systems in a single platform, "while complying with data residency regulations, meeting latency requirements, and helping to significantly reduce operational costs."

James Crawshaw, a principal analyst with Omdia (a sister company to Light Reading), sees similarities between Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer and AWS Outposts."To IT people it looks the same as public cloud – the same interfaces and APIs, for example – but it's running in a box in the operator's own data centres, so you don't have to worry about EU customer data leaving the EU or getting leaked accidentally," he told Light Reading. "You won't get any hardware economies of scale, as it will be a box from Oracle, but you are outsourcing some of the IT admin, such as operating system patches and so on."

Still room for public cloud

Telefónica Spain's on-premises enthusiasm, stressed Crawshaw, is not an indicator of any operator cooling on public cloud."Not all of the apps will migrate due to regulatory or cost reasons, but as the big cloud vendors put more flags on their data centre maps the data sovereignty concerns are reduced," he said. "I expect public cloud uptake to increase but it's still early days."

Roy Illsley, Omdia chief analyst, notes too that Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer is part of a hybrid‑cloud play by the US supplier.

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Light Reading.

"While you get a fixed resource capability installed in your DC, it can extend to the public Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, so you are not constrained," he told Light Reading.Illsley says the hybrid model is the direction of travel enterprise organizations are taking, referring to last year's ICT Enterprise Insights survey, conducted by Omdia, that found an 18% growth in hybrid‑cloud adoption year-on-year.

Results of the 2021 survey will be out in mid-October.

— Ken Wieland, contributing editor, special to Light Reading