BT (NYSE: BT) is expanding its cloud presence by offering its global customers the ability to connect to Oracle's cloud infrastructure, illustrating the growing movement by service providers to allow businesses to bring their own cloud to the service table.
Through this agreement, Oracle customers in the United States and other regions will be able to gain access to the features of the BT Cloud Connect environment to get direct connectivity to the Oracle cloud.
Cloud may have a number of advertised benefits of scale and ease of use, but the reality is that large businesses have lingering concerns about security and performance issues. A particular issue is the cloud's ability to support business-critical enterprise workloads that frequently demand high levels of availability, security and performance.
To alleviate security and performance concerns, BT and Oracle are providing a series of connectivity options from hybrid enterprise data centers to the Oracle Cloud.
A key element of this solution is its ability to maintain a private connection. Similar to other telco solutions like AT&T's (NYSE: T) NetBond, BT Cloud Connect for Oracle FastConnect allows customers to use a private connection based on BT's IP Connect VPN service to exchange large volumes of data between the Oracle Cloud and their own on-premises environment.
BT will connect directly to Oracle's Cloud locations in Amsterdam and London, giving customers global access from any location to services provided in European data centers. By conducting pre-provisioning via BT Cloud Connect, BT said it can reduce the typical dedicated connection deployment time from months to days.
While service providers giving access to third party clouds has become a table stakes requirement to compete for large enterprise accounts, connecting to Oracle is a major one to have in the pipeline for BT, particularly as it faces greater competition from not only AT&T, but also Level 3.
Today, the Oracle cloud supports 70 million users and more than 34 billion transactions each day and runs in 19 data centers worldwide.
BT's agreement with Oracle builds on the service provider's Cloud of Clouds portfolio strategy by allowing its multinational customers to connect to the cloud through a centrally managed high-speed network that includes what it says is predictable performance, reliability and embedded security features.
BT and Oracle plan to start offering the service in the final quarter of calendar year 2016.
For more:
- see the release
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