Oracle UK To Open Dedicated G-Cloud Data Centre

Oracle is launching a new UK data centre  entirely for government contracts in the G-Cloud, hosting applications delivered by both Oracle and its partners.

The data centre will be in the Thames Valley and will comply with the IL3 security specification, a government requirement for this type of work. It joins Oracle’s general purpose data centre in Linlithgow, and follows an announcement of a UK data centre from rival Salesforce . Although Oracle would not say where it is, or how big it is, chief operating officer Mark Hurd promised the facility would open in June.

Oracle accepts ISVs in G-Cloud playground

“We are putting another data centre in the UK to serve the government,” said Hurd. “It will also be available to ISV s in the UK who are servicing the G-Cloud.”

By opening the data centre, Oracle hopes to stimulate and work with the Government’s stated ambition to use smaller firms alongside existing contracts with large players such as Oracle.

“We have to be local in our deployment to meet regulatory requirements,” said Hurd. The new data centre, like other Oracle facilities, will be built using Oracle’s engineered systems in a standard configuration.

Oracle now has over $1 billion (£655m) in cloud subscription revenue, Hurd told an Oracle Cloud event in London attended by around 1000 people.

The Oracle Cloud is built on broad capability coming from various acquisitions over recent years, but all the functions are being moved to Oracle’s Fusion middleware, instead of the home-built code they were created on, he said.

“When we buy in a company, not all companies have been building on the same platform,” he said. ” Those that are built on Fusion, can be integrated very easily. Those that aren’t, we won’t disturb right away, but over time, we will  migrate them.”

Quizzed by TechWeekEurope, Hurd denied Oracle’s cloud revenue was undermining its licence revenue: “Licence revenue includes many things, and we have seen solid growth in our licensed business over the last several years.”

Hurd claimed to be “agnostic” between licensed and cloud revenue, allowing users to have things whichever they wanted.

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