• Both Spain’s Telefonica and Telecom Italia have signed collaboration agreements with Oracle 
• Underlying both deals is a desire to address the problem of multi-cloud linkage and how to develop it

More positioning has been announced today on the enablement of multi-cloud capabilities - both for cloud customers and for telco services and internal workings. Yesterday we looked at two contrasting vendor approaches to the multi-cloud edge: Today the biggish news is that Telecom Italia (TIM), which has spent more than a year gathering elements which might fit together to enable it to offer the multi-cloud linkage that customers say they want, has announced its plans.

TIM has made a collaboration agreement with Oracle and its own cloud subsidiary and Google Cloud Partner, Noovle, which it acquired last May. The companies have agreed to work together to offer multi cloud services for enterprises and public sector organizations in Italy. 

The three companies bring complementary assets and expertise to the table, claims TIM.  Noovle brings an Italian data center network. TIM has its established customer relationships and vast sales network, meaning it has the ability to integrate cloud services with its ICT services portfolio which covers the range from IoT and 5G services to cybersecurity and advanced connectivity expertise. 

Oracle has next-generation cloud infrastructure smarts, it claims. Until recently the company appeared to be unsure of its future direction. It had to spend some time living down its leadership’s anti-cloud rhetoric, for sure, but now appears to have found its footing to support hybrid and multi cloud strategies which TIM finds is “highly suited for mission-critical and cloud native workloads in large enterprise and public sector environments.”

It says that Oracle is championing a collaborative model, which includes ensuring that all customer data is hosted in-country, and that customers have a cloud solution that meets their data sovereignty needs, something that TIM is also very supportive of. 

As part of the deal, TIM is to take on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as part of its multi-cloud strategy to migrate the Group's mission-critical data management workloads to the public cloud and will adopt the Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning application.

Exactly how the elements will fit together as per the three way agreement to support customers is unclear. Noovle, which acts as TIM’s centre of excellence for cloud and edge computing, says it has a focus on supplying ‘bespoke’ multi cloud services to TIM customers. 

Telefonica also climbs on board

Oracle last week also signed a similar, but less public cloud-oriented agreement with Telefonica España. Telefonica says it’s a multi-year collaboration to accelerate its cloud adoption and its development of new communication services for consumers and businesses.

Under it Telefonica will migrate the bulk of its Oracle Database systems to Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer and build a dedicated cloud platform on-premises to support provisioning and delivery of new services. 

This project will include Telefonica’s mission-critical operational and commercial systems, such as its BSS and OSS platforms and applications, business intelligence systems, CRM, billing, revenue management and so on - all part of a multi-year plan by Telefonica to consolidate its technology infrastructure into a shared, open-standard platform designed to support its growing digital services portfolio, including new services around Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G, and services co-hosted with ISVs and network partners.

Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer is an on-premises deployment version of Oracle Exadata Cloud Service, and will be delivered as a managed cloud service in Telefonica’s own data centres. This enables Telefonica to consolidate its mission-critical systems on a single platform while complying with data residency regulations, meet latency requirements, and help reduce operational costs.

“Oracle Cloud@Customer provides us with the flexibility we need to build a robust, extensible cloud platform in our own data centers that is scalable and elastic to meet the changing needs of our business,” says Fidel Jesús Fernández, Telefonica’s Director, Technologies and IT Transformation.