Oracle's Steve Daheb on making automated databases available to enterprises on-premise

US-based Oracle Corp. will soon be bringing its automated database on the premises of enterprises, a feature that has been available only on the business software maker’s cloud till now.

In an interview with TechCircle, senior vice-president of Oracle Cloud Steve Daheb said that, keeping in mind compliance issues and data sovereignty laws globally, the company will serve its customers. 

“We are putting the cloud behind a firewall for some companies from a compliance perspective, which can't have their data anywhere else. For us, it is the same technology, same services and we will be offering autonomous (automated) database on premises soon,” said Daheb. 

This could mean more business for the company in countries like India, where firms take a hybrid approach, which is to say they store some data on premises and some on the cloud.

Vaibhav Gawde, head of solution consulting at Oracle India, in an earlier interview with TechCircle, had said that the company was in the process of pushing its autonomous cloud solutions to customers of its database management system, particularly in the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) and telecom sectors.

Daheb also took a swipe at cloud competitor and market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS), saying that it was not possible for AWS to have these conversations with enterprises as it did not have a solution for customers that are required to store some of the data on premises due to compliance issues or certain characteristics of apps that do not allow for migration to the cloud. 

“There might be some apps which may move right away while there are others that might stay on premises, either due to data sovereignty issues in some regions or other reasons. We are in a good position as the Amazons of the world cannot have that conversation. We continue to sell you licences on premises and we can create a hybrid cloud model,” added Daheb.

Although Oracle had celebrated what it said was a “stellar quarter”, revenues from cloud services and licence support for the three months to February-end were up one per cent, or four per cent in constant currency, at $6.7 billion, compared to the same quarter a year earlier.

Daheb did not reveal the percentage of customers that have signed up for the autonomous database on premises. However, he did claim a significant edge over competition.

“We are able to shift the conversation with enterprises on cost savings. We are 14 times faster than Amazon. That's a big driver, as is security and cost performance. Now buyers can focus on other customer-facing issues,” said Daheb.

In an earlier interview with TechCircle, Oracle India managing director Shailender Kumar had said that the company had lowered costs and was offering more flexibility in order to compete with rivals.

"We have a Universal Credits system, wherein customers can buy any kind of cloud service. With Universal Credits, customers have one simple contract that provides unlimited access to all current and future Oracle PaaS and IaaS services, spanning Oracle Cloud and Oracle Cloud at Customer," Kumar had said.

The conversation around data sovereignty and security becomes more relevant at a time when Oracle has lost out to AWS and Microsoft on the vendors’ shortlist for US government’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure award for a 10-year single-vendor military procurement of cloud services. Oracle has appealed to be back in the running. 

Note: The author is at an Oracle conference in California, US at the company's invitation.